


Ambrosia and snake oil are sold by the same vendor

by CatSteppingOnAKeyboard



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Buddy says it's my turn to use the maladaptive coping strategy, But it's more like a buddy movie, Cult infiltration, Fake Marriage, Gen, Juno beefs with an eight year old, Martian technologies, Mick Mercury holds a political office he's not qualified for, More sentient than usual, Peter has a chronic illness, Specific trigger tags will be included at the beginning of every chapter, the Ruby7 is sentient
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:35:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 25
Words: 189,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22689337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatSteppingOnAKeyboard/pseuds/CatSteppingOnAKeyboard
Summary: “Twirl for me, Juno.”“I’ll do it if you close your eyes.”Nureyev takes his hand and makes Juno twirl. The rainbow skirts of a summer dress flare, a yellow cardigan snapping about him, his gold sandals flashing. The effect is of a rainbow octopus flashing its warning colours on the end of Nureyev’s arm.Nureyev catches Juno by the waist “You look splendid.”“I look like I run a mommy-blog.”“I think that’s the point, Juno.”Juno Steel is a lot of things. A happy home-maker ain't one of them, but hey, how hard can it be to play nice for a bit, especially if it means uncovering a source of the cure-mother? Except it's not that simple because nothing ever is in Juno's life. Suddenly he and his family are poised on the verge of an intergalactic conspiracy that pits Juno against old friends and enemies, while the fate of a dying species hangs in the balance.Also some furby nightmare fell out of the vents and Vespa won't let them put it back to the woods.
Relationships: Buddy Aurinko/Vespa, Jet Sikuliaq & Juno Steel, Peter Nureyev & Jet Sikuliaq, Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel, Rita & Juno Steel
Comments: 407
Kudos: 344





	1. Juno's new mom dresses him funny.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the wonderful art of asianartiste.tumblr.com, specifically that set of drawings where Juno and the crew are each depicted in different undercover scenarios. I picked the scenario with him and Jet, because I love their dynamic, and I love Jet, and I feel an affinity with Juno, as a fellow tired non-binary, especially in situations where he has to pretend to be nice.

Like all the kids who grew up in the gutters of Old-Town Mars, choked on smog and generational poverty and their parents’ disappointment, Juno Steel did not imagine himself spending the rest of his life in the grasps of the place. He had plans. Detailed, imaginative, optimistic plans which centred around his main goal in life: to get himself and his brother the fuck away from Sarah Steel. By extension, that would mean getting the fuck away from Old-Town, with its 40% unemployment rate and its 3,000 unsolved murders a year and its boot-strap myth concocted by capitalists, parroted to its poor every time somebody asked why in the hell Old-Towners never got any help.  
He and Benzaiten were going to get away, just like Sasha. Maybe Mick could come along if he promised to behave himself, but if it ended up being only Benten that Juno could bring with him, Mick would understand. Benten came first. Always had, always would. Mick could make his own way. 

As they grew older, Juno’s plans grew more and more ambitious. A shared apartment in down-town Hyperion, funded by Juno’s police-work and Benten’s dancing lessons. A modest house on one of the middle-range lunar settlements where Juno imagined himself as some kind of private security contractor, while Benten taught dance to courting couples, bored house-spouses and reluctant teenagers. A farm in the communities beneath Jupiter’s red spot, where Juno tilled the soil and Benten could keep on dancing, maybe find a partner and have the kids he talked about; twins again, since they ran in the family. Juno would have been content to work himself raw for the rest of his life if it meant he got to share it with Benten. If he just got to watch his brother keep dancing.  
Cue Sarah: an out of control alcoholic who was apparently unsatisfied with these defects because she decided she should also be a murderer. Sarah orphaned Juno in the most profound way she knew how to. To this day he is convinced that at least a little piece of her knew which son she was really looking at when she squeezed the trigger, and that piece knew it was hurting Juno more than death could. When Juno lost Benten he lost their plans, and the desire to make any for himself. He stopped thinking about the future. He put his head down and trudged his way through the police-academy. He trudged through a few relationships, platonic and otherwise, and only really came back to the world for one or two people. 

Juno surprised himself with his temper. He surprised himself by how easily he could repel people; potential friends, lovers, mentors, even the attendant behind a cash-register. Push him just a little bit and the veneer of rakish charm flaked off and there, underneath, was his mother’s son. Most people decided they didn’t need to wait around for Juno to figure himself out, to pack that poisonous temper away, put the whiskey flask down and maybe take up a hobby apart from brooding out of dark his office windows. How Rita managed to survive him, Juno doesn’t know. He will, however, never stop being grateful that she did and that she still wants to be in his life.  
If Juno knew a way to peel back the curtain of time to the day Benten died, he would tell his younger self that one day life wouldn’t be so unbearable. That he shared his future with another kind of partner. Sure, she is loud and short and always smells like shrimp junk snacks and everything she wears is some shade of pink, but she is also great, and Benten would have loved her. In her special, tireless Rita way, she made Juno think about the world again and what he really wants from it. She helped the gears start turning. So did Nureyev, although the poor guy was really not prepared for the minefield of Juno Steel the first couple of times their paths crossed. And then people were suddenly banging on his walls, demanding to be let in with their grand promises and job offers. Even when Juno resigned himself to having to partake in life, to live and love again because the world wouldn’t leave him alone, he did not imagine any of the dozens of possible futures that opened up in front of him would lead to a place like this. 

“’Plutonium’?” he repeats that day at lunch/ the strategy meeting. 

“Platonium, darling, as in Plato, as in platonic idealism. Archetypes that represent the true nature of an object or an idea. I don’t suppose I have to tell you what a community has to think of itself to be named as such.”

“Tell me anyway.” he said. Every time Buddy started quoting the ancient greats of the old-earth past, she lost him pretty quickly. 

Buddy explains by unrolling a large sheet of paper with a flourish across the table. Rita and Nureyev know by now to lift their plates out of the way because Buddy absolutely prioritises dramatic effect over whatever she might spill or break in the process of achieving it. 

“Oh,” Nureyev’s lip curls “One of those suburban satellites.”

“You know the type, I’m sure,” continues Buddy “Every time planet-side gets to populous or ‘low class’, everyone wealthy enough to do so moves up to a satellite settlement. Either they become absentee landlords, or they move all of their money out of the public infrastructure and cause a financial crisis.”

Vespa takes a draw from her morning coffee and swallows her noon-time medications with it “It’s not always bad. On Eris we purposely drove the bougies out and did fine once they’d all fucked off to that tacky thing orbiting Dysnomia. I personally devalued real estate in my neighbourhood by a couple billion dollars and all it took was swimming in the borough’s water a couple of times-.”

Buddy clears her throat “Yes, my love, we’re all aware that you’re classified as a public health risk on Eris. Back to my point. When the wealthy decide that living on terra firma is beneath them, they create places like The Platonium. It’s affluent, it’s glossy, it’s teeming with well-to-do families raising well-to-do children for the same unimaginative life in a few decades.”

Juno feels that he has caught on “So we’re gonna rob them blind, right?”

Vespa laughs. Buddy smiles. Juno’s heart sinks.

“Juno, you’re going to join them.”

So, The Platonium. The exact opposite of the place young, hopeful Juno ever imagined himself and his brother joining. The exact kind of place older, tired Juno does not want to spend his time, and yet here he is, and here’s Jet, and now they’re pretending to be married.  
Why does Juno do this to himself? It doesn’t have to be him preparing to do battle with people whose fortunes have existed longer than interplanetary settlement. Battles of wit and subtlety, of quiet scorn and the careful manipulation of others. That kind of stuff is literally how Nureyev has made his career. King of schmoozers that he is, Nureyev offered to go instead, pointing out rightfully that Juno was more likely to turn a bake-sale into a bar-fight than he was to blend in. Buddy responded by pointing out that Nureyev came with his own set of problems, one of the biggest being that dropping his radiant, sexy confidence into a hotpot of crumbling marriages would reap emotional casualties equivalent to dropping a daisy cutter into the centre of a megacity. The point was to infiltrate, not to set off a shockwave of sexual awakenings in people who married their high-school sweethearts.

Juno agrees. He knows very well how dangerous Nureyev can be when he wants something from you. Besides, he wouldn’t have been thrilled to know that Nureyev had to investigate and maintain his cover while also deflecting a horde of suitors. On the other hand, nobody in their right mind would endanger a marriage over Juno.  
With him out of the running, who else could accompany Jet but Juno? The thought of Vespa trying to tame her neuroses for a community mixer was both laughable and sad. Buddy’s facial scarring would ostracise her among a community that named itself after the idea of perfection, whereas Juno’s are just enough to illicit a shallow pity. Even if she covered her scars, she still presents the same problems of bombshell sexiness as Nureyev. And tossing Rita into the hell of cookie-cutter suburbia? Nobody wanted to do that, both to save Rita’s feelings and the community from the psychological trauma. 

This left Juno as the only choice. So, here he is, and here is Jet, and here is The Platonium, and Juno is already so sick of the shininess of the whole place he wants to puke. Perhaps sensing his discomfort, Jet takes his hand. He and Juno wear a pair of platinum wedding bands that materialised from what must be a dragon’s stash of jewellery in Nureyev’s quarters.  
Buddy had only to mention that she still had to scrape up rings from somewhere and the man was off just as fast as he could safely go on stilettos, returning with these bands, and the gaudiest, ugliest ring ever made by human hands, which he slipped onto Juno too. Plenty of people on the satellite will have engagement rings like it, Nureyev assured him. An emerald the size of an egg isn’t unusual in satellite-settlers, Juno, so don’t fuss; it brings out your eye anyway. 

Jet and Juno, now Ishtar and Aileron Gosh, are just exiting the clean terminal into the clean, airy street with a projection of a blue Earthling sky pasted over the space they have just come from.

Juno shields his eye against the sun “Whoever does the settings on the solar mimic in here is a sadist.”

“The climate is supposed to mimic the mid-ranges of Northern California.” of course, Jet has memorised every bit of information that Buddy could give him. 

“What’s California? Is that one of those lunaroids they keep finding around Ceres?”

“An old name for Western Tejás. I’d never heard the name used before researching this place. It strikes me as a pedantic and unfortunate choice to inspire the climate of a satellite. They have a very mild winter here, almost no snow. I imagine the monotony must be awful.”

“Well it’s better than Mars. Which road are we on? It’s Elm Street, isn’t it?”

Jet nods. Juno has no doubt that Jet has memorised the street plan of their immediate neighbourhood. He, frankly, has no idea where they’re going, which is fine because Jet knows. Juno took responsibility for memorising the figures they will seek out to gain entrance into the cult. The division of labour tends to go like this when they work together. Juno has the sense of direction of a concussed homing pigeon and Jet hates initiating conversations.

It occurred to him on the shuttle over that Jet’s got his own kind of magnetism going on. A quiet, big guy, attentive to the needs of his much smaller companion. Handsome face, shiny hair with streaks of early stress-grey in his hair. Juno doesn’t know if Jet is just remarkably attractive today, or if he has never noticed how many people look twice and appreciatively at him. To top it all off he looks non-threatening. Buddy has stripped him of his usual leathers and jeans for slacks and a sweater, and the result is somebody’s maiden uncle, or a public servant who golfs on the weekend.  
Juno is trying not to think about the way he looks. Covering up the sleeve on his arm of the goddess Benzaiten hurt, of course, but being caught because he didn’t want to cover his brother’s memorial would also hurt. It is the rest of his disguise which stings his pride.  
He knows he will never fully forgive Buddy for not only asking him to play at being a happy homemaker, but for dressing him so damned funny.

“This is your target. The head of the snake.”

Buddy hands him the tablet she used to read the news open onto a colourful article. It is an interview spread over four pages of a tabloid masquerading as a lifestyle magazine. The text is a little too small for Juno to read. For a moment he tries to expand the page, then Vespa gets impatient and reads aloud over his shoulder

“ ‘…the figurehead of the wellness movement is one K. Takagi, who credits her youthful vigour to the mystery product which only members of her exclusive social enclave have access to’… Ok, that could be the cure-mother. Or that could be anything. I knew a lady who used to harp on about this wonder cure she’d discovered. Turned out to be her own piss.”

“I am rather glad you wouldn’t let me imbibe when she offered the mystery flask.” Buddy squints at the tablet “Anyway, the rest of it goes on like that about the place she lives and the circle she runs in. There’s a dozen stories about satellite lifestyles and health movements like hers every month.”

“So why are we going out there? If it ain’t to steal ‘em silly, I mean.” asks Rita. 

Buddy opens the next window “Because of this.”

Seasoned as they all are to grisly murder scenes, the crew cannot help but reel back in disgust.

“Was that a person?” gasps Rita. “Can’t be! That’s gotta be marinara sauce.”

“Until three weeks ago this marinara-like mass was a rather central figure in the infrastructure of the ‘Group for the Advancement of Community Wellness’. His name was Treelore Jiwe. He had a spouse and a child and a good career on the business-tier of the satellite. And he died from a blow of a force that no device I am currently aware of could produce. There’s no doubt in my mind that he was killed by the organisation because he intended to reveal the true intentions of their operation to the public. What you’re seeing is a snapshot of his murder pulled from the security cameras outside of his house, where it was committed. In the middle of the street, at nine, on a school night, so it wasn’t exactly a concealed death.”

Juno considers the meaty man-smear. He spies a mangled sweater, twisted into the remains the way a foil twists into chocolate when you take a bite of a candy bar without unwrapping it “He go to one of your friends?”

The flash of pride in Buddy’s eyes makes Juno’s face warm “Very good, Juno, he did. Which one do you suppose?”

Juno thinks for a moment “I’m gonna say it was La Charladora. She’s the biggest, best information broker we know. If you want a headline to go interplanetary she’s usually the one who can make it happen.”

Rita nods along, enthused “All them industry contacts! Not to mention them writing chops. Did you guys ever read her report on the pollution dumping practices back on Earth? Gave me chills!”

“And then nothing changed.” says Jet coolly over his tea “Except she protected her informant so poorly they were drowned in nuclear waste.”

“Exactly. I fear La Charladora has been getting a bit… she is rather getting on in years” Buddy looks to her partner for help “Help me, love, I don’t want to be cruel.”

“She’s batty? Complacent? Careless? Waiting to die behind her writing desk so her nephews can inherit her empire of snitches?”

“At any rate, La Charladora has reached out to me and asked that I pursue the lead that was brought to her. Treelore Jiwe had brought her a compelling story about a month earlier. Then, a week ago, he brought irrefutable evidence that would implicate at least thirty-four people on charges of trafficking of illegal and unregulated substances, harassment, business fraud and a few other things. La Charladora was making arrangements for his family to be removed from The Platonium to a safer location while the story was broken, but she didn’t move fast enough.”

“Batty.” repeats Vespa.

“Needless to say, she feels an obligation towards the surviving Jiwes. The spouse and the child are trapped there. As far as The Platonium knows, Treelore abandoned his family. I’m sure they are too terrified to say otherwise. He and his spouse were quite deeply embedded into the cult before…well, we don’t know what made him change his mind, but he did, and he was punished for it. His spouse and child were not. This is much a rescue mission as it is an information-gathering mission. Now, here are the two things that will be annoying. The security on the satellite is very tight. That’s why the story hasn’t been broken already, because it’s just too hard to hack into without being noticed. La Charladora only got away with this snapshot before the system noticed her and, as she explained it, ‘blew her computer up from the other end’. We don’t actually know what the spouse and the child look like, and they do not share Jiwe’s surname. He was very protective of their identities. I suppose he was worried that something would go wrong before extraction, as it did, and anonymity was the only way he saw to protect them.”

“So we’re gonna have to find out who his family are, on top of figuring out who’s who in the cult?” Juno rubs his temples “Krishna and Jesus, that’s gonna be rough.”

“Oh, no, we know who’s in the cult. They published their names in the magazine, darling. Here, scroll down a bit. There’s a group-photo of the organisation. Now, the third and most trying problem is that Jiwe wasn’t able to communicate the exact nature of the supplement his people took to achieve that glowing health you see in the photo. If we can both retrieve the surviving Jiwes and discover the nature of the supplement, La Charladora will owe us a sizeable favour. As I’m sure you all know, a favour from La Charladora is worth its weight in gold.”

“Gold isn’t that valuable.” says Nureyev.

Buddy touches his shoulder “Darling, you needn’t worry about interacting with her at all. You and your litany of aliases shall remain off-limits.”

“When that woman is on her death-bed, I’ll break into her hospice and whisper my truth as she finishes her dying breath.”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure you will. Jet, Juno, you two had better start memorising these faces,” she passes the tablet to Juno “And these blueprints,” she tosses a paper map to Jet “Your cover story puts you in engineering in the bowels of the satellite. See if you can’t find a bunker full of cure-mother somewhere down there. 

The Platonium is small for a settlement. Seven kilometres across, eight and a half wide with one of those tiered systems that make Juno claustrophobic. 

A small and robust business district floats as high in the projected sky as it can without scraping the taller buildings on the ceiling. Below that is a much bigger leisure level. One half caters to wholesome family activity, the other to seedier adult activities. Juno and Jet are on the lowest levels where the two schools, the houses and the multifaith centres cover the ground from corner to corner. Avenues are lined with a mishmash of trees that have no business growing next to each other- pines growing beside frangipanis, jacarandas and cherry trees leaning on one another like drunks.  
Juno notices a little hatch in the roots of a creeper fig. As he watches, the hatch springs open and spits out a tiny drone that vacuums up a patch of leaf-litter. It has completed the job and retreated within ten seconds. He counts six more by the time they have turned out of sight of the intergalactic terminal.

The houses are all squarish and cute and white-washed. Every one of them sports a manicured yard and invariably a manicured person sitting on a wrap-around porch, reading and chatting to neighbours. The only real difference from house to house is the colours of the painted doors and the patterns of the curtains, and even then there is not much variance from red and blue, and gingham and polka-dots.  
After a couple of blocks, they stop to get their bearings, beneath a tree where several bird-shaped drones have gathered to pump a tinny song into the air. Their design might have been inspired by a parrot of Earth’s tropical forests, but it comes off as a bit threatening because they are the size of Hyperion-city crows. The crows that could pick kids and short teens up by their shirts and fly a couple metres with them before fabric ripped. Sometimes they got away with whole babies, if the crows were fast and the baby was on the smaller side. The satellite’s animals pose a different threat; each and every specimen contains a sophisticated surveillance system that observes the settlers at all hours of the day. 

Juno is just telling Jet about Hyperion crows when a kid skids to a stop on an analogue bicycle, shinier than any vehicle Juno has ever owned.

She looks them up and down with the naked, mistrustful curiosity of a kid whose hypothalamus has only just started to work. Juno and Jet stare back at the kid. 

The girl slides a hand under her industrial-strength bike helmet and scratches at a pigtail “You guys are the Goshes?”

Anxiety prickles in Juno’s chest at the sound of the cover-name “That’s us. Are we on Elm Street?”

“Yeah. You guys are all the way at the end. Just keep walking. What happened to your eye? It’s gross.”  
Hypothalamus hasn’t started pulling its weight just yet.

Juno pretends to be embarrassed. The character he plays is supposed to be self-conscious about the scarring and would never even consider the Juno Steel-impulse to tell the kid her face is grosser.

He touches the base of the scars with a fingertip and shrinks into Jet’s arm “Um, that’s not a polite question to ask.”

“I’m not polite. I just wanna know.” as if to prove the point, the girl lets out a monstrous burp before leaning over her bike and pedalling for all she’s worth. She has whipped out of sight into a backyard before Juno can find something to throw.

“Why is it, no matter how pretty a place is, the kids are always rude as shit?”

“Children of that age are only a few steps away from cave-men, cognitively speaking.”

As the rude kid promised, Number 4 Elm Street stands at the end of the road. Buddy picked a house that backed up onto a park and had only one immediate neighbour so that Juno and Jet had some shelter. The previous tenants had a passion for bougainvillea and planted most of their lot with the stuff, giving them the screen of thick, thorny walls that will muffle sound and block the views to windows. There are probably cameras perched in the corollas of every single one of those out-of-season blossoms.

Mounting the brick front-steps, Jet pulls a key-card out of his pocket which is shaped like an old low-tech key, and holds it to the door until the lock-shaped reader clicks open. 

Juno moves to join him on the porch. Out of nowhere, a lawn-care drone bolts across the lawn and sweeps his legs out from under him “Jesus and Buddha!”

Jet catches him before Juno is even halfway to falling over. “That is unsafe. They should have motion sensors.”

Then he looks at Juno. To those who don’t know Jet his face doesn’t seem to be capable of much expression, nor does he seem to have a sense of humour. Juno knows better. He notices the microscopic curve of Jet’s lips- his smile. A tiny glint of mischief enters the man’s eyes.

“Don’t do it,” he whispers.

Too late. Jet scoops Juno up “Welcome home, Mrs Gosh.”

Aware of how high off the ground he is, Juno puts his arms around Jet’s neck. He smiles sweetly for the flower-cameras and speaks low so his voice won’t be picked up “I’ll kill you. Slowly.”

Jet carries him over the threshold anyway.

As Buddy arranges for their luggage to be sent ahead of them, she pulls each of them aside to explore their undercover wardrobes. According to Buddy the cover is easier to maintain if one gets into character a few days in advance. Jet gamely allows himself to be stuffed into polos and college-professor pants, puts his hair back and is good to go. When Juno sees what she has planned for him, however, he fights. Buddy fights harder. She wins. It takes Nureyev ten minutes to coax Juno into the light.

Juno sees gallantry and shock battle across Nureyev’s face. Gallantry wins and Nureyev keeps a straight face. “Twirl for me, Juno.”

“I’ll do it if you close your eyes.”

Nureyev takes his hand and makes Juno twirl. The rainbow skirts of a summer dress flare, a yellow cardigan snapping about him, his gold sandals flashing. The effect is of a rainbow octopus flashing its warning colours on the end of Nureyev’s arm. 

Nureyev catches Juno by the waist “You look splendid.”

“I look like I run a mommy-blog.”

“I think that’s the point, Juno.”

“Why are these people trying to live forever if they’re just gonna dress like this?”

“No accounting for taste.”

News travels through The Platonium faster than regret through the aftermath of an orgy. Just an hour after Mrs Gosh has been carried over the threshold of his new household, the neighbours begin their assault. Juno looks the part of a harried new homeowner, now, changed into a green and gold lungi and a t-shirt with the logo of a Venusian community theatre. He has Vespa on the coms, talking to her as if she is his mother for the benefit of the surveillance devices, which she is instructing him on how to locate.

“I’m worried about the couch, Mama. It came with the house and I don’t know if it’s hypoallergenic.”

Vespa’s scratchy voice is scratchier with excitement. Ransacking a pretty cookie-cutter house in a pretty cookie-cutter development for bugs and cameras? Her ideal afternoon. The only way this day could get better is if she were with Juno in person. Good thing she isn’t. Their cover would be blown immediately, because when Vespa gets excited like this she tends to forget she is a 25th century woman with sophisticated tools for disabling these sorts of things and starts to use her teeth. 

“Check the seams,” she rasps “Every time you feel a lump, use that penlight I gave you. Click the base of it and there’s gonna be a tiny electric discharge that should disable the bug. Just make sure it’s close or it won’t work.”

Juno gets on his knees and gropes the seams of the cushions “I’m worried, Mama. There’s got to be something about the house that isn’t right, you know? It all came furnished. I just don’t trust a place this big to get everything right every single time! You know how bad Al’s allergies can get if the wrong particulate gets into the house.”

“We just gotta do a thorough search. I’ll talk you through it. And who the hell is Al?”

In the background, he hears Buddy reply “Jet’s using the name ‘Aileron’.”

Vespa’s voice grows distant as she turns towards her “Jesus, Buddy, are we doing that again? Thematic aliases? That got us caught on Oberon.”

“I am firm in my belief that it was entirely unrelated to our aliases. It was that damn customs agent trying out some cheap extortion racket on two off-planeters.”

“To be fair to him you were bringing in foreign fauna.”

“Foreign- it was a sealed packet of peanuts!”

Though his head is under a cushion, Juno hears the knock. That assured, demanding knock he recognises from times when a difficult client came into his old office. The kind of knock Rita uses in the mornings when Juno has been in the bathroom for twenty minutes trying to make one wing match the other and, hey, Mistah Steel, you know there’s no shame in asking for help and also I really gotta pee-

Juno straightens up so fast he gets a head-rush “Coming!”

He jogs to the door, thrusting the coms and the penlight into Jet’s hands on the way.

“Tell her about the plumbing, Al, I’m sure there’s something wrong with the bathroom.”

Juno sees the neighbours before he gets the door open. One of them is peering through the letterbox- genuinely, actually peering through the letterbox. In all his forty and a bit years Juno has never seen a real adult human peer through a letterbox. God, this is terrible. 

At the sight of his approach the letterbox snaps shut. But Juno is fast. Faster when he’s angry. He opens the door on a trio of people gathered up on the front steps, one of whom is just getting out of a crouch. This puts her at about eye-level with Juno’s crotch. 

Shameless and bright-eyed, the woman stands up and holds out a plate of plastic-wrapped cookies. Immediately, Juno recognises her: K. Takagi. 

“Welcome to the neighbourhood!”


	2. Again, with the Soup

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick note: the word 'porro' is hispanohablante slang for a marijuana cigarette. I hate all of the English words for it so I use one from my second language. Big thanks to my cat for beta-reading this, by which I mean headbutting me while I was trying to make the final edits. 
> 
> Trigger warnings: brief discussion of recreational drug use (marijuana), discussion of emotional manipulation by a non family member, mention of implied miscarriage (part of the cover story), mention of social pressure to drink alcohol, implication of ableism

Two nights before Juno leaves for the Platonium, Buddy comes to his bedroom. She prefers to make use of the witching hour to have her private pep-talks/ dressing-downs with her crew, either because of the psychological advantage she gets from appearing out of the night like a matronly wraith or because it’s something to do when she can’t sleep. Juno swings himself out of bed and let Buddy in. Buddy’s curls are up in silk for sleep exposing the molten half of her face. The other half of her face is cross hatched with pillow creases. Even her cybernetic eye has bags underneath it.   
Still, she floats into his room in a cloud of plush velvet and grace, making to sit on the edge of his bed. She stops short when she notices Nureyev is already there.

“Don’t worry about him. He sleeps like he means it. Here, watch.”   
Juno grabs Nureyev’s shoulder and gives him a few vigorous shakes. Nureyev doesn’t so much as twitch.

“An enviable talent,” Buddy seats herself at Juno’s desk instead, leaving the bed to him “Sorry to disturb you so late, Juno. I…I’m afraid.”

Juno waits for her to finish her thought. She doesn’t.

He prompts “Afraid of what?”

“Of all of this, honestly. The fact that the organisation could bring itself to kill a member as violently as Treelore Jiwe was killed. The amount of sophistication and money and boldness that backs it. The idea that the elixir of life they promise is some off-shoot of the Cure-mother. The idea that they have nothing at all and I’m wasting our time.”

“Just that?”

She draws the folds of her robe tighter about her torso as if she felt a chill “Apprehension is normal. I would hope it comforts you. If I didn’t feel some apprehension about sending you and Jet into a lion’s den, we would have much bigger things to worry about…truthfully, I am most afraid for Jet.” 

Juno cocks an eyebrow. Over the last year and a half of knowing Jet, he’s felt many things for the big guy. Fear on Jet’s behalf is not one of them.

Seeing his confusion, Buddy continues “Jet is a strict and stoic man, Juno. There’s not much that rattles him.”

“Yeah.”

“But he was rattled. I don’t know that you’re able to see it as I can because- well, because I’ve known Jet for longer. I watched him change from a dangerous, reckless, amoral man to simply a dangerous man. He never left that other version of himself behind entirely. If any of us could completely sever the past I doubt you and I and Peter would be here. Jet’s past just came back to him in a way that…that I’m not sure he was prepared to deal with. I’m not sure he has any strategy to deal with this beyond compartmentalising and self-flagellating behind closed doors. He realised that the self he thought of as ‘old’ is still relevant to him, and it can’t be contained the way he has tried. Jet is grieving for what he thought he achieved for himself as much as he is for what happened to M’tendere.”

“He isn’t sleeping well, lately, is he? I think I hear him walking around at night.”

Buddy nods “Juno…I hope this doesn’t hurt you to hear, but a large part of the reason I brought you aboard the Carte Blanche has to do with Jet.”

“Huh?”

By that point Buddy is visibly uncomfortable, which is a new thing. “In my line of work- yours too, now… it’s difficult to form lasting relationships that aren’t based on some kind of, ah, trade. A trade of monies, of favours, of contacts, of information. After Vespa and I were separated, Jet was the first person I had a connection with that wasn’t based in trade like that. He and I ran across each other in difficult moments in our own lives. We leaned on each other for help. I’m not going to say we saved each other, but we helped each other make the necessary changes to improve our respective circumstances. That could have very well turned into a business relationship. A relationship of convenience, you know. But it didn’t. Towards the end of it all Jet and I found that we preferred our lives when we lived them together. Have I lost you, darling?”

Juno shakes his head “I get it. Jet is your Rita.”

Her smile is almost shy “I suppose. Jet likes you, Juno. I don’t say this to disparage your merits, but you probably wouldn’t be here if not for Jet. You have no doubt noticed that Jet and I are solitary creatures. For me, that’s a choice. For him…he cut himself off from many people when he began to change his life. He has few friends now and I wonder if it hasn’t come down to a lack of opportunity. People want to know him for his reputation. Or that is the reason they avoid him. You, Juno, met him and came to know him without knowing what his past looked like. Part of what I wanted to achieve in recruiting you was to…to give Jet an opportunity.”

“What do you need me to do for him? I’ll do it.”

Buddy gives him a long, hard look.

Juno returns it “I mean it.”

At those words, Buddy slumped. She looked tired- tired by more than a lack of sleep “Honestly, Juno, I don’t know. I want to help Jet. I simply have no idea how you or I or anyone should go about it.”

Juno wonders if he should consider it a success that he and Jet have not even been on the satellite for a day before they are invited to their first ‘get-together’. By the ringleader of the whole operation, no less. The woman who brought him cookies is K. Takagi. ‘Karen’, she made sure to tell him, is spelled ‘K-A-Y-R-R-I-N-E’.  
Juno, whose unusual name has condemned him to a lifetime of being called ‘Uno’ and ‘Junko’ and ‘Bruno’, considers it a testament to his self-control that he didn’t sucker-punch her off his porch. Accompanying her were her two lieutenants in the operation,   
whose names only got worse. The one who brought the welcoming curry was ‘Nadine’ spelled ‘N-A-D-E-I-N-G’, which isn’t even how that should be pronounced, and ‘Georgia’ who spelled it ‘J-I-O-H-R-J-A-H’. 

Juno felt like he had showed up to a cannon-fight with a water-pistol when he introduced himself as “Ishtar Gosh. Aileron, honey, come say hi to the neighbours!”

They were head-hunted the second they touched down. Kayrrine even introduced herself as the head of the Group for the Advancement of Community Wellness, searching Juno’s face for a hint of recognition at the name. Juno gave nothing away. One of the key things about Ishtar Gosh is that he does not expect to be taken advantage of or tricked. A target ignorant of their vulnerability is a great temptation to predators like Kayrrine, and so she has invited them along to a meeting to judge what kind of addition Ishtar would be for her organisation. And not just the surface-level bullshit Wellness thing, which Juno has attempted to indicate that Ishtar is interested in.   
He left a six-pack of kombucha in a conspicuous spot on the counter and swatched his hands with an organic lotion that smells strongly of turmeric. Satellite settlers can’t get enough of turmeric. They even put it in their lattes, which is weird, because in Juno’s experience the only time turmeric goes in a beverage is to blast the pathogens out of an ailing kid. These satellite people drive up the price of a Martian staple and can’t even figure out how to use it properly. Juno doesn’t know how much more disillusioned he can get with the sheer amount of waste and wantonness he already sees on The Platonium. He just hopes that when he inevitably snaps, Jet will be there to hold him back. 

Now, the party. The ‘get-together’. When was the last time Juno was at a party that was not also a part of a mission? With Diamond, which is an unpleasant and confronting thought, but which he can also push away because Jet is here and Jet reminds him that the people Juno choses to surround himself with are a lot safer than they used to be. Well, safer for him. Jet has killed, like, twenty people. 

Juno knows at least two-thirds of the faces here from the manifest list of members that La Charladora passed along. The other third constitutes people’s kids under the guidance of a half-dead nanny and a few other uninitiated stooges who cannot believe their luck. Uninitiated are easily told from the regular members of the organisation because they are not fringed with the rude glow of health and beauty that is uniform among the Wellness Centre’s members. The people here are unnaturally pretty. Like, literally, pretty in a way that nature does not often allow and age diminishes. A type of imagined, aspirational pretty that is only possible through serious cosmetic interventions, and yet there are no tells of surgeries or detailed make-up. Except for the odd lip-stain, every person here is bare-faced.   
A couple of them have visible scars (less severe than Juno’s) and one uses a cane. It occurs to Juno how strange it is to see only one person using a mobility aid out of a crowd of thirty or twenty. Strange and frightening. 

Juno has strung himself on his fake-husband’s bicep so tightly his knuckles are a bloodless white. Jet’s grip on him is just as tight, wielding Juno like a shield. Juno is fine with this. He is the shield. Jet is the sword. Together they make a complete unit that can stand up to the twenty or so people gathered in Kayrrine’s corner-plot. At some point they will have to divide and conquer. But it won’t be soon. 

“Are you sure you won’t have a little glass of wine?” asks Nadeing for the fifth time in half an hour.   
The bottle of Europa-Riesling has been at her elbow for the whole night. She offers it so as not to appear stingy, and so later she can argue that she didn’t finish the whole bottle on her own.

“No thanks,” says Juno. “I don’t drink.”

Nadeing squints as she measures another dram into her own glass “I had a phase like that when I was trying not to drink. Then I came to my senses.”

A laugh ripples around the living room. Juno and Jet have been dragged into a tight circle of people splayed over a couch, an ottoman and a coffee table, which are identical to the pieces in Number 4. Kayrrine holds court from between two buxom women, her legs tucked in one’s lap. Juno forgets which of them is her wife.   
Jet was offered a chair. Juno perches on the arm of it, Jet’s hand possessive on his leg. Having Jet touch him like a partner changed from weird to comforting the moment they set foot in Kayrrine’s house. 

“Well, we just figured it’s best that we get it out of the way. Tee-totalling. Neither of us want to drink for the first two years.” forcing a smile, Juno looks conspiratorially at his fake-husband.

Kayrrine’s eyes brighten “Oh! You’ve got a little bundle of joy on the way?”

“Not yet. Soon, we hope.”

“How do you plan to have them? Amal- you carried Hawk-Eagle, didn’t you?”

A man with long legs nods over on the ottoman “My wife started the pregnancy. It just made her so sick, though! So we went ahead and transplanted her womb for the last seven months.” he grins knowingly at Juno “I love Hawk-Eagle, but let me tell you, I didn’t enjoy puking five times every day it took her to finish growing!”

Juno laughs. Inside, he screams. Why do they think they can engage him on something so private? Are The Platonics super invasive or is Juno the crazy one? 

Kayrrine laughs too. Louder. “If it were me, I’d ask Aileron to carry the kid! You’re a big man. You could take it better than poor Ishtar.”

Jet grimaces “We might adopt.”

“Oh,” Kayrrine exchanges a knowing look with Jiorhjah “That’s so noble. I could never do that. I’d be afraid to have a kid with, I don’t know, something- something wrong. Physical stuff is easy to fix these days. Mental stuff not so much. Buddha and Jesus, honey, we’ve had such a time with Tsuper-Tsonic, haven’t we?”

The woman under Kayrrine’s arm nods.

“Not even Ultra-Ritalin worked on her. We’re trying her on something new. TSUPER!”

Jet jumps. The movement pulls Juno all the way into his lap.

Kayrrine shrills twice more before a kid breaks through the forest of adult legs. The very same rude-as-shit kid that confronted the Goshes earlier, in fact, out of her pigtails and into a starched party-dress that makes Juno itch sympathetically. Kayrrine has done her best to dress the kid up to mimic her own outfit, but the deep reds that make Kayrrine’s skin so vibrant are lost on her daughter, making her look sickly and tired beyond her eight years.   
When the girl catches sight of the Goshes, she gives them a challenging scowl. She must think that Juno complained about her rude-as-shit comment. 

As if Juno’s going to beef with an eight-year-old.

Smiling, Kayrrine pats her kid on the head “Are you and the other kids having fun?”

Tsuper-Tsonic shrugs “Yeah. Grace ate a bunch of grass before and she just puked it up.”

“Oh, Lord.” one of the women leaning on the couch finishes her gin in one gulp “I better go check on that.”

“Tsuper-Tsonic, these are our new neighbours. Say hi.”

Reluctantly, Tsuper-Tsonic steps over a row of legs and sticks a hand out to Juno “Pleased to meet you.”

Juno shakes the kid’s hand “Me too. Do you living here?”

“I like riding my bike. School’s boring.”

Kayrrine laughs again. This woman laughs a lot “I keep telling her how lucky she and her friends are. So many children would love to be in her place at a good school with fun teachers.”

She mumbles as she shakes Jet’s hand “They can have it.”

“What do you like to be called?” says Juno, because he can tell having to talk to him is pissing the kid off. Maybe he does want to beef a little bit with an eight-year-old. 

“Soup. My friends call me Soup” she says immediately.

Kayrrine sighs “I wish they wouldn’t.”

Beneath him, Jet shakes. Juno realises he is holding in a laugh. Of course this is what Jet finds funny. Goddammit, if Jet starts laughing then he’s gonna set Juno off and they’ll become social outcasts on the first day because, shit, the kid has a point; if Juno were saddled with a dumbass name like Tsuper-Tsonic he’d insist on being called Soup too.   
Mercifully, Kayrrine excuses her daughter. The kid is almost as fast on foot as she is on her bike. She looks back at Juno and Jet with something like gratitude on her face. That, or she’s trying to summon another burp for a parting gift. 

Kayrrine returns her attention to Juno “So, where are you two from?”

“Olympus Mons.” says Juno, hating himself for it.   
Olympus Mons is the bougiest city on Mars and well on its way to being one of the worst in the whole solar system. He had to go there once for some inter-departmental police conference, back when he and Sasha still worked closely, and they played an illicit-substance game on the first night: a shot for every hot yoga studio and a toke on the porro for every organic-foods store they could see from their hotel window. The fact that neither of them were caught or demolished by alcohol poisoning is, to Juno, a possible proof of a merciful god. 

Nadeing burps behind her hand “You have an election coming up soon, don’t you? It’s terrible what happened to the last mayor. I was listening to this amazing podcast about it the other day.”

“Who are you voting for? If I’m allowed to ask that!” asks Kayrrine.

Jet wraps an arm around Juno’s waist. The ringing in Juno’s ears quiets somewhat, but he cannot bring himself to speak. More than a year later and O’Flaherty can still stop him in his tracks.

“I’m afraid you’re thinking of Hyperion City.” says Jet “Ishtar and I don’t pay much attention to politics outside of our borough. It gets a bit distressing.”

By which he means the last time Martian election news came up on the TV without a warning, Juno broke a bowl and locked himself in the bathroom to hyperventilate. 

“So did you grow up knowing each other?” Amal is beginning to take an interest in Jet that seems more ‘I’m in an open marriage’ than neighbourly. 

“No, only Ishtar grew up in Olympus Mons. My roots are on Earth.”

“Oh!” Amal makes the universal ‘doy’ gesture by smacking his own forehead “I was wondering why you were so big! Earthling! How tall are you, by the way?”

“Seven foot four. That is the average height of AMABs from my region of Earth, so I would not consider myself a ‘big’ person-”

Amal talks over him to get the attention of a person with ambitiously frosted tips “Yocheved, I remember you telling me about how tall all the people on Earth are! You went to that little country with all the volcanoes, didn’t you? God, what’s it called? And, Aileron, why are you all so tall?”

“The technology the rest of the worlds use to create survivable worlds use a stronger force than Earth’s-”

“Hawai’i? Iceland? It was Hawai’i or Iceland, right?”

“No, dumbass, it was the Philippines!”

Nadeing swigs directly from the Riesling “Ishtar, are you sure you won’t have a drink? What about Aileron?

They split up a few moments later. Leaving Jet to the house-husbands , Juno rises and joins a few people in the kitchen where he grazes on a cheese-plate and makes light conversation. He does his best to file away the names - Persimmon, Ruqswana, Buckley, Taira, Rilla, another Buckley, and matches them to the database in his head. Persimmon the treasurer. Ruqswana the fitness advisor. Buckley and Taira import the ingredients for their special supplement and introduce themselves with the menacing title of ‘wellness chefs’. Rilla the curator of the Wellness Centre’s vague and simple website that has not been updated since their magazine feature some eight months ago. Buckley appears to have no use to the Centre but he was in the splash photo and he’s here now, and damn, can that man put away the hors d’oeuvres, so maybe that’s something.

Honestly, Juno is overwhelmed. There are too many of them. Despite the diversity of skin colour, lid-shape and hair texture, they all manage to look the same. As if they picked different masks to stretch over the same face. This is made all the more obvious by the scattering of hopefuls, who are like the dark spaces between lampposts at night. It is a good thing that Ishtar’s character doesn’t demand that Juno appear at ease among them; the more nervous he looks, the more believable the con will be.   
This, the lynchpin to Ishtar’s character, is the only thing that makes Juno truly grateful that Nureyev didn’t end up coming along. No matter how out of place and menaced and downright fucking ugly a place might make Juno feel, if Nureyev is with him, he sees to it that those feelings are soon gone. Better than Juno feels a bit of genuine discomfort so that it presents as genuine in Ishtar. 

Eating one’s feelings is a poor coping mechanism, but fuck it, Juno will let himself be a bit dysfunctional for the performance’s sake. He drifts into the kitchen where the snacks are plated and has just shoved a sizeable wedge of cheese in his mouth when he feels a hand on his shoulder. As he hoped, Kayrrine has sought him out.

“How are you doing? It’s not too much, I hope?”

Muted by the cheese, Juno shakes his head.

Kayrrine rubs his shoulder with a familiarity Juno doesn’t like “I noticed you left when we started talking about children.”

Untrue. He left a little bit after and the conversation had moved to PTA-politics.

“Was that over-stepping? Asking you about kids, I mean.”

Oh wow. This woman. This woman is a piece of work. Every inch of her lineless face drips with smugness and good intentions. 

He swallows the cheese and does his best to look downcast “Oh…I’m not sure I should burden you with all of that. It’s a bit much for our first day knowing each other.”

Her eyes gleam. She wraps her arm all the way around his shoulder; a snake measuring itself against prey “Don’t worry about that. We’re all friends in The Platonium. We have to help each other out.”

“To be honest, Al and I were pregnant a little while ago. It just- it didn’t work out.”

The lie tastes bitter on his tongue. Borrowing a grief that is so common and so devastating, a grief that no doubt belongs to a couple of people here. But this is the script that Buddy drew up for him and he can’t start improvising just because he feels sleezy.   
Speaking of sleaze. There is a naked delight in Kayrrine’s eyes. Juno Steel knows to look for it. Ishtar Gosh doesn’t, however, and lets himself be hugged.

“I’m so sorry.”

Juno hugs her back. He also reaches around her for another piece of cheese.

“When did it happen?”

Juno brings a hand up to his mouth, choking on his grief. And secrets the cheese into his mouth “Two months ago. We were thinking about leaving Mars in the first place. It was the final push.”

“Do you mind if I ask which one of you was carrying?”

“Neither of us were. Aileron and I both have, um, problems, that prevent us from carrying a pregnancy or a womb-insert. It was all external. We knew it would be harder to carry one to term but…I guess we thought it would never happen to us. You always read about these things. They don’t happen to you.”

Kayrrine rubs his shoulder again “Until they do.”

“Until they do.” he echoes.

“Ishtar, what are you doing tomorrow?”

“Just a little unpacking. I’ll be alone, actually, since Al has to go for his orientation in maintenance.”

Kayrrine snaps the bait up quicker than Juno can blink “Listen, why don’t I drop by? I’ve got this group that I go to during the week that can help with these sorts of things. I’ll pick you up around, say, ten tomorrow? Does that sound ok?”

“Oh! You don’t have to. I wouldn’t want to put you out so much. You’ve already been so nice-.”

She pats his arm “Really, it’s no trouble. Like I said. The Platonium takes care of its own. You’re one of us now.”

Juno smiles, showing off a smile that is a product of Buddy’s regimen of whitening strips and a cap over the tooth he cracked on a fist a few years back.   
“That sounds great.”

Kayrrine is about to say something else, but Jiorhjah puts their head through the kitchen door and calls “Kay-kay, you’ll never guess who’s finally here! Damien just got in.”

The woman brightens “At last. I thought he’d stood us up. Come on, Ishtar, come meet Damien. He’s a Martian like you and- my god, he’s so funny.”

Juno lets himself be steered out into the hall, the vapid smile affixed on his face. On the way past he catches Jet’s eye and gives him a subtle thumbs-up. Jet returns it. 

Kayrrine waves somebody down “Damien! I thought you weren’t coming!”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Kay-kay, something just came up as I was going out the door.” says Damien.

Only, Juno knows that voice. Juno knows that voice and it does not belong to anybody named Damien. For the first time all night a true dread grips Juno’s stomach as he meets the eyes of the man that has just walked into the room, and the man meets his eyes, and recognition passes between Juno Steel the private eye and Julian DiMaggio the Saffron Prince.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Juno just wants to eat cheese and break cultist knees. Why must the universe continue to challenge him? Just let the lady have his cheese and his investigation. 
> 
> Also, the names Rilla and Damien are absolutely a reference to Second Citadel. I'm gonna continue to make stupid little references like that because I am easily amused


	3. My husband, my gym-partner

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: brief mentions of a chronic illness (Nureyev's), mention of canonical character death (M'tendere's), semi-graphic descriptions of car crash related injuries/ deaths, mentions of consensual + voluntary sex-work with an implied exploitative relationship with a pimp.

Juno stares at Julian. Julian stares at Juno. Then Juno does what he does best: something stupid.

Without breaking eye contact, he fumbles at his left earring and pockets it, then drops to all-fours, exclaiming “Whoops! I just realised I lost my earring! Sorry, if y’all wouldn’t mind just shuffling- thanks, thanks so much, thank you-”

He crawls all the way back to Jet.

Juno wraps a hand around Jet’s ankle and whispers “We gotta fucking go.”

Jet pulls him to his feet and stands “You’re right, we are late. I hope we haven’t missed our window to call Dad.”

Juno latches onto him like a lamprey on a shark-belly, and is glad he did. Jet turns into a battering-ram and facilitates so speedy an exit that they only just have to time to pass on excuses and thanks to their host. The sting of the dumbfounded expression on Julian’s face is tempered by the confusion on Kayrrine’s at watching her prey escape. But she cannot challenge Ishtar/Juno without seeming rude in front of thirty people, so she must let him go. She waves from the doorstep. Over her shoulder, Julian gapes, his mouth working like a fish’s. 

The acid of an impending panic attack pricks Juno’s chest and lungs. Jet tucks him protectively under an arm and hurries him around the corner, back to Number 4.

“Shit,” Juno gasps “Shit. Shit. Sorry, I think I just- I don’t know. He knew it was me.”

Jet squeezes his shoulder “Tell me at home. It’s alright.”

“It’s not.”

“It will be.”

Juno holds it together as far as the house. Then the moment he’s over the threshold, his panic changes to anger. Ripping off his shoes, Juno throws his hands up at the sky in a silent fury. Though they have gotten rid of all of the listening devices he cannot be sure next door won’t hear him if he starts cussing. So he grabs a cushion off the couch and proceeds to roar into the stuffing.

After a courtesy period of two minutes, Jet makes him put down the pillow “What happened?”

“You saw the man in mustard that was staring at us.”

Jet’s face grows more serious “He knows you.”

“Yes.”

Jet pinches the bridge of his nose “I am glad that you have connected with so many beautiful, capable people, Juno, but if the number is truly so large that you will run into one each time we go undercover-”

“Holy Thor, Jet! It wasn’t like that! He was an old client! I got him out of a framed murder charge, then I helped him find his husband. Well, his husband’s body. He didn’t hold a grudge. I don’t think he- fuck, Jesus, what if he does?”

“Breathe. I will call Buddy.”

At first Buddy is half-asleep and pissed off. Then she is just pissed off. Soon, the whole Carte Blanche listens to Juno describe the encounter with Julian and their history as client and detective. Rita interjects every now and then to say she’s sure Julian doesn’t hold a grudge, even if Juno didn’t save his husband and then ate a one-of-a-kind piece of ancient alien technology that belonged to his company. In the same week.

“I’m coming to get you.” says Nureyev.

“No,” it sounds like Buddy catches him by the back of his shirt “You are not. Calm down.”

“Juno and Jet’s cover has been compromised,” he returns with an edge to his voice “I will calm down when they are with us.”

“Peter, darling, I understand you’re concerned. I also understand that you aren’t thinking clearly. Tell me what you think it would look like if a strange man came to Number 4 and took away its occupants before the first day of tenancy was up? A man with no documents and no permission to dock on The Platonium.”

“I don’t care very much what that would look like. I am certainly sure whatever obstacles might arise will not be enough to keep me from-”

“Wait, Pakak.” Jet cuts across him, calling Nureyev by some mysterious nickname neither of them has ever bothered to explain “Buddy is right. None of us are thinking clearly.”

“Buddy is.” says Vespa.

Juno breaks in “Fine, except for Buddy. I’m definitely not. It just threw me off. It’s probably gonna be fine. Like I said, like Rita said, Julian wasn’t a vengeful guy the last time we saw him.”

Rita clears her throat “Gotta remind ya, boss, he’s lost a lot of his company since the last time we saw him, what with that merge with Northstar. Maybe he ain’t in such a good mood these days.”

“Shit.” says Jet placidly.  
Juno can’t even enjoy hearing Jet cuss for the first time, he’s so fucking wound up.

Buddy pushes ahead “Juno, you say he met you in the context of a detective-client relationship. It stands to reason he assumes you still work as a detective. Furthermore, I’m sure if he hears you referred to by another name, he will assume that you are undercover. Now, darling, how likely is it that he will compromise that?”

Juno takes a deep breath “I don’t know.”

“Let’s- Peter, sit down. Let’s give it a day. If by tomorrow you have reason to suspect your cover has been in any way compromised, I’ll take the leash off Peter. Is that alright?”

“Yes.” says Juno. 

Jet is not so quick to accept the instructions “What about the lead? After such effort organising this infiltration, not to mention the promise of this lead, I am not sure I would abandon it because of some suspicion against us.”

Buddy gets very close to the coms “Listen to me carefully Jet. Fuck the lead.”

“Buddy-”

“Fuck. The. Lead. We have other leads. We do not have other Jets and Junos.”

“I really think-”

“I am done discussing it.”

Closing his mouth, Jet stands up and walks into the kitchen.

“Juno, can you see to it that the two of you will be ready to leave if you should have to?”

“Yeah, Buddy. Don’t worry. I’m just- shit, guys, I’m sorry this happened.”

Her voice is brusque again “You have nothing to be sorry for, Juno. Sometimes a plan goes awry for no reason. You certainly couldn’t have done anything to stop it. Now, there’s no sense in us staying up. Juno and Jet can take care of themselves. I am going back to bed. Vespa?”

Vespa leans in “Sure you got all the bugs?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Great. G’nite Juno. Hope they don’t burn the house down around you.”

Nureyev is incensed “Jesus, Vespa!”

“What? I said I hope they don’t get torched.”

She hands the coms off to Rita “What’cha think, boss? Should I prep the escape vehicle? Ol’ Ruby misses Jet already. She’ll be glad to come getcha.”

Since when is the Ruby a ‘she’? Last time they had this conversation Rita was insisting it’s pointless to apply human gender conventions to an alien car.

“It’s probably fine. Let’s just do what Buddy says.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah I’m sure. Is that ok?”

“It’s ok if you’re ok.” she yawns “Are you ok?”

“I’ll live. Go back to bed, Rita.”

“Night-night Mistah Steel. Love ya.”

“Love you too Rita.”

And now to placate Nureyev. Although Juno is sure Jet isn’t listening in, he goes into the bedroom anyway. An impish impulse for mischief combines with left-over adrenaline and compels Juno to start jumping on the king bed as he talks to Nureyev. He ducks at the parabola of each jump to avoid smacking his head on the ceiling fan.

“I won’t lie- I was so goddamned- scared when I saw Julian- I lost my mind a little bit.” Juno spits out a few words in between every bounce.

“What did you do?”

“Pretended I dropped- an earring so I could- crawl back to the- spot I left- Jet. Obviously he’d seen- me already! Obviously! I don’t know- why I did that.”

Nureyev sighs. In the background, Juno can hear him fussing with the kettle “Sounds like you made a scene.”

“At least I – told the ringleader- our cover story. Most uncomfortable conver-sation I’ve had.”

He hears the smile in Nureyev’s voice “You seem to have bounced back, at least.”

“That a joke? Be-cause I’m jumping- on a bed right-now.”

“Why on earth?”

“I don’t know- I’m nervous as-hell. Wanna give Jet -some space- to cool off.”

Juno falls to the mattress and lays there, breathing heavily.

For a moment he just listens to Nureyev move. Millions of miles away, through a familiar space they usually share. Juno wants very badly to be in the same room as Nureyev. It always occurs to him in quiet moments like these, when they are separated by work and incredible distance, that he has already spent so long away from Nureyev. Doesn’t seem right that he and Juno should be required to leave each other again. 

“I miss you.” he says.

Water pours into a cup from a long height “I miss you too.”

“Is that weird to say? I just saw you this morning, but I already miss you.”

“I don’t find it strange.”

Juno shuts his eyes “Tell me about your day. How’s your pain?”

“Present and manageable. We didn’t get up to much today. Rita hacked into the BFS databases to run some surveillance. Buddy spent most of her day on the phone, making inquiries as to how she should go about setting up a large-scale pharmaceutical production and she had me run the numbers for how much capitol it would take to start from scratch. Vespa napped.”

“What kind of numbers are we looking at?”

“Obscene numbers. I dare not repeat them. It looks as though we’re going to have to acquire our own factory.”

“I thought this stuff was gonna be free when we do, if we do, figure out how to make it.”

“It will. Juno, you forget that you’re among thieves now. We’ll finesse the factory somehow and Rita will drain a billionaire’s petty-cash account. Staff won’t be a problem for a project like this.”

Juno rolls over onto his stomach “I never forget that I’m among thieves. Every time I try to save some left-overs, I get a cruel reminder.”

Nureyev laughs “I told you, it wasn’t me who ate your left-overs, Vespa doesn’t like pad thai, neither Jet nor Buddy can eat it without dying, and Rita would never do that to you. You talk in your sleep sometimes. Sleep-eating is not out of the realm of possibility.”

There is a thump in the kitchen. Jet bumps into something and cusses for possibly the second time in his life.

“I should check in with Jet.”

“Good night Juno. Dream of me, will you?”

Juno lets him hang up and lays there for a couple of minutes longer. His heart returns to its resting beat. The world tries to float away, but the sounds of Jet in the kitchen keep dragging him back.

It is easy to mistake Jet’s stoicism for emotional distance, just as it is easy to mistake his inwards-facing nature for egoism and selfishness. Every time Juno talks with Jet, he gets the sense that he only has half of Jet’s attention. This made worse by the fact that Jet ponders his responses for a lot longer than most people. An exchange that might take thirty seconds with anyone else on the Carte Blanche will take five minutes with Jet. It used to piss Juno off, how much Jet requires you to slow down, to take your time and finish a thought all the way before he’ll let you jump onto the next one. What’s the point? The pace of real life is fast and unforgivable, so why does Jet think he can step off to the side and take his sweet time with it all?  
For a person like Juno, whose life had been about running laps through a cycle of perceived failures and fumbled chances at redemption, Jet’s way of living challenged him. The idea that someone with a past arguably more steeped in regret and blood than Juno’s own could just, slow down, and be ok with himself, and be ok with the idea that not everyone- that most people would not accept him…that was a learning curve. 

Juno is so glad that he took the time to figure it out.

Jet is leaning on the edge of the sink. He is big in this kitchen. Carries so much tension in his shoulders; a human in a Lilliputian’s house, wearied by the care with which he must move to avoid breaking the little world about him. 

Juno touches his shoulder “What do you want for dinner? Unless you plan to, uh, brood over the kitchen sink for the rest of the night. That’s fine. I can work around you.”

Jet’s face is humourless “I am fine.”

“I don’t think so. I got hungry in hour two of that five-hour ordeal, and the cheese plate didn’t help much. I didn’t see you touch a thing. So, what do you want for dinner?”

The big guy’s shoulders relax by a fraction “Something simple. I do not believe I have the mental energy for much.”

About ten minutes after Nureyev hangs up the coms, the Ruby starts honking her horn.   
At first the honks are irregular and can be written off as what Nureyev thinks of as ‘snoring’- random honks, beeps or whistles that come out of her when she is off. Then she starts up a slow and insistent tattoo of honks, unmistakably what Nureyev thinks of as her ‘herding call’, which she uses to summon Jet when something has gone mechanically wrong with her, or, Nureyev is sure, when she wants to hang out. Nureyev is a sound sleeper. Vespa is not. She bursts in and shakes him by the shoulder for about thirty seconds before she gets the first stirring of consciousness and informs him through gritted teeth that his baby is fussing. By the time Nureyev finally slides into the garage, Ruby produces a loud, sustained honk that echoes through the tiny ship.

“Fine! Fine! I’m here! Must you have a tantrum at this hour?” 

She falls silent in an instant. Her headlights flicker on, in spite of her being turned off, creating the impression of a smile on her grille. It is easy enough to judge what she wants. Nureyev has a hard time telling her no. Tonight he feels especially fragile, with his usual bedfellow off on the other side of the galaxy, and since he is already here, he figures he might as well just sleep in the back seat tonight.

Moving Rita’s booster seat to the floor, Nureyev stretches his long self across the cushions and gets as comfortable as he can with the bits of seatbelts poking into his shoulders. Luckily, the car is spacious enough that he can lay down without touching his feet or his head to the doors. 

“Is Buddy’s neck pillow still in here?”

After a second, the rear-view mirror swivels to point at the shotgun seat. The neck pillow is stuffed down the back of the pocket. Plucking a long red hair from it, Nureyev makes his second attempt at getting comfortable. The cushions seem to grow softer beneath him- more mattress than seat.

“Thank you, Ruby.”

She whistles back. 

Over the several times Nureyev has run across the Ruby7 in his career, she looked very different on the inside. When he and Juno liberated the car to raid the Utgard Express she was a sleek, two-person vehicle with a top that could be lowered. A few days after Juno took his leave and Nureyev picked himself up off the floor, the Ruby7 was more like the cab of an analogue, long-haul truck so that any second passenger would have had to sit in Nureyev’s lap. By the time he returned her to Jet, she was equipped to fit an entourage of six or seven people, and her driver’s seat had expanded to accommodate Jet as a sort of assertion, Nureyev thinks, that he was back to being her main pilot, so Nureyev was supposed to sit in shotgun again. First-generation Earthlings like Jet are enormous compared to their extra-terrestrial cousins. Jet is 7ft 5in, which makes him on the smaller side for an Earthling but a huge person in every other context.  
It was easy to tell that Ruby had adjusted herself for Jet. Now, Nureyev won’t pretend that he wasn’t a bit hurt by her insistence that Jet be her primary driver, but he understands. Ruby is like a person in that she has her favourites. What Nureyev cannot reconcile is why she would pick Jet as such when Nureyev himself presents such a tempting alternative- one who has recognised her personhood from the first minute he saw her in action.

The air within the car is thick, the way it gets when Ruby is troubled. Nureyev can see why she called him out to the garage. She doesn’t want to be alone.

“Jet’s alright, you know. He is just far away.”

She trills. The sadness in the note is unmistakable. The surliness and resignation, too, making Nureyev smile.

“I know it’s hard. I hate that you and I can’t chase after them right now, but we have to trust them, both of them, to handle the situation. They agreed to it. It’s their mission. And if we get the result Buddy thinks we will, then so much the better.”

Unconsciously, Nureyev has put a hand over his lower stomach. Over the spot that pains him the most. 

Ruby notices and tilts her rear-view mirror to reflect it.

Nureyev glances down “Well, I won’t lie, Ruby, it doesn’t feel good. I’ll wear the waist-trainer all day tomorrow, I expect, but I had to give it a rest today.”

As far as Nureyev can tell, the idea that Nureyev cannot be easily fixed confuses her deeply. Whatever kind of intelligence is in there, its body is an obsessively tended machine. She is confused as to why Nureyev can’t just crack open his ribcage and invite a doctor to rummage around in there when his disease gives him especially bad pain days. The simplicity of her understanding of the human body is at once cute and sinister, because it reminds Nureyev of just how many drivers have been killed behind her wheel. Beheaded, coming out the other side of Space Hell without the driver that was there only moments ago, organs crushed to jelly by the steering column refusing to collapse, vaulted through the windshield by faulty brakes, a shielding glitch that causes sudden decompression…   
Frankly it is a miracle that Jet and Nureyev have survived to drive her more than once. Nureyev has a theory that Ruby knows she exerts a magnetic attraction to all those who have seen or driven her before. One that has meant she has shuffled from owner to owner for most of the time she has existed. Who wouldn’t get sick of that? She chose Jet and Nureyev to a lesser extent, comparing them to some mysterious criteria that so many others have failed. 

Jet thinks Nureyev is off his rocker. He insists that the Ruby is no more than an unusually intuitive calculator that observes and mimics the behaviour of the people who steer it, and cannot be faulted for the number of drivers that have died in its seat before; the one disagreement they have had in their many years of sharing custody of the car. However, since the incident with M’tendere Beza, Jet has been a little more open to the idea that the Ruby has her own agenda. 

“Ruby, this is a morbid question…am I laying on the bloodstain?”

She whistles an affirmative.

“Wonderful.”

Nureyev shifts into the driver’s seat and lowers it.

“Call me superstitious, but I’d prefer not to sleep over a spot where someone died.”

Ruby makes a noise like a human clucking their tongue: she didn’t call him superstitious. Ruby wasn’t thrilled about the death in her backseat, nor how badly it affected Jet. It was Buddy who took the body out and Buddy who ‘disposed of it’, which Nureyev doesn’t even want to imagine the meaning of, and Buddy who attacked the enormous quantity of bloodstains with an even more enormous quantity of bleach. By the end of it, Ruby’s seats were cleaner than they had been at the beginning of the day.   
Even so it was almost a week before Jet could face getting inside the car again. Nureyev ended up sleeping within Ruby on a handful of those nights, in the smell of bleach and the ozone of confusion at what Ruby perceived as Jet’s sudden rejection of her. Explaining the mechanisms of grief and shock to a car was one of the weirder afternoons Nureyev has spent. 

“Do you feel better now?”

Ruby makes a noise that sounds like a sullen grunt. A noise she seems to have picked up from Juno.

“Alright. I’ll close my eyes. You try to do the same. If you need me, you know how to wake me up.”

Nureyev finds that he can’t follow his own advice. Instead, he lays on his back and stares at the strange patterns on Ruby’s ceiling- the one part of the car that you can see change from minute to minute. Upholstery stops at the top of the windows. From there, her insides are a metal that shifts in colour like a quartz prism against light, except that its changes are far more subtle and muted. A puppet-show as seen from the very back of a long auditorium. A shadow warped by the distance it casts. 

Nureyev traces a finger along a whorl that turns from purple to blue to black beneath his fingers “Where are you from, Ruby? Where is home?”

Under him the car purrs, its engine turning over like a sigh. She blows cool air through Nureyev’s hair and lowers the chair a by a few more centimetres so his chair is fully relaxed. Somehow, he can still taste it in the air, how much she misses Jet. How much she wishes he were here too.  
And that, Nureyev supposes, is as good an answer as any. 

Figuring The Platonium’s foodstuffs could be drugged or tampered with, Buddy sent quite a few food items with them. She said it would be enough for a week. Apparently, Buddy thinks they’re going to spend every minute of that week stuffing their faces, because she sent them off with enough to feed a goddamned intergalactic expedition. Juno is overwhelmed by choice and, panicking, grabs a chicken and nothing else, which is how they end up finishing an entire rotisserie chicken between them. Jet doesn’t care. The friendship has moved past the point that gnawing on a chicken in the dead of night like depressed cavemen would cause embarrassment. Over the meal they attempt to talk about which of the partygoers seemed the most suspicious and capable of murder, but they are each too tired to keep it going and lapse into a companionable silence.   
Tonight has been shitty and frightening. When Juno has a night like this, he tends to appeal to the customs of his childhood for comfort. For example, born and bred Old-towners never use cutlery except for soup or at a dinner party/restaurant in the next borough over. Why bother with the extra fuss of a fork if your hands were clean? Juno fell out of the habit when he moved out of Old-town; anything to distance himself from that place and what it cost him. This means he is a bit out of practice with his hands and ends up wearing a good bit of his dinner. 

So Juno isn’t exactly presentable when the doorbell goes. He freezes with a bone between his molars. 

Wiping his hands on a kitchen towel, Jet moves for the door “You should be ready to run.”

Juno gestures to the stains on his blouse “I think I’m too greasy to catch.”

Whoever chose to visit them at half past midnight is very insistent on being let in. They have rung the doorbell a further four times and are still jamming it when Jet opens the door.

“Hi,” says Julian DiMaggio “Sorry for the hour…would it be alright if I came in?”

Forgetting his greasiness, Juno ducks under Jet’s arm “Oh. Uh. I guess.”

Everything about Julian is apologetic. He tries to shrink himself as he comes in, toes his loafers off and shakes Jet’s hand. Juno’s, he reaches for, then recoils. 

“I’ll go change my shirt. Just- uh, would you like some tea?”

Five minutes later, Julian nurses a cup of chai at the dinner table. The remains of the massacred rotisserie dinner are pushed hastily off to the side. Juno resists the urge to pick the last scraps at it while he waits for Julian to find his voice.

Julian starts with a smile. His teeth are no longer a blinding white nor are his canines capped with gold. The soft gold phosphorescence that once came off his skin is gone, leaving him as ordinary as anybody else. He has definitely not been initiated. That means he may not know to mistrust the cover-story of Treelore Jiwe’s absconding. 

“I must have scared the shit out of you, huh, Juno?”

Juno shrugs “It was unexpected.”

“You crawled away from me on all-fours.”

His face grows hot “Classic HCPD evasion manoeuvre.”

“I know why you’re here, Juno. I’m here for the same reason.”

Much as he doubts this, Juno lets the man talk.

“I knew I wanted to start over after my husband died. Mars was never really my home to begin with…it was more like a marketing tool. Did you know I’m actually from Make-Make? There are only about five thousand people out there. I was convinced I had to leave my little town to start a good life, so I threw myself onto the first opportunity to get out of there. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, Juno. You’ve heard it all before.”

True. The first time Juno worked for Julian to get him off that murder charge, he got all the gory details of Julian’s past. Young and fresh when he arrived on Mars, he fell into sex work because it was the only job he could get for a while. Julian was more fortunate than most in his position, finding a way to turn it into modelling, which turned into a career he could see himself pursuing for the rest of his life. When his pimp realised how close one of her best workers was to getting out of the life, she arranged for murder charges to be brought against him. The charges would disappear if Julian gave up his dreams of escape.   
From within the walls of Hoosegow, Julian reached out to Juno and explained his situation between sobs. Relishing the chance to play hero to the dude in distress and fill that hole in his heart for a few days, Juno set upon the pimp and her tissue-paper thin case against Julian. He went after her the way a dog goes after an unattended piece of cheese. The pimp stumbled out on the other side of the experience, wounded and humiliated, perhaps more than she needed to be. The fact that a third of the shady pimps in Hyperion City wanted a piece of Juno’s hide for a few years afterwards was, he told himself, a natural consequence of being the Lady Who Fights Back, although Rita thought they could have come out of that situation with less trouble if only Juno had been a little less enthusiastic about going after the pimp. By which she meant, hey, maybe setting the woman’s car on fire and faking an affair so her husband divorced her was too far. 

The important part: Julian got out. He got married. He got a life he seemed to want and more money than he’d be able to spend if he lived to a hundred and twenty. If anything, his fortune should have swelled after his husband died. The original DiMaggio was one of those self-made businessmen who screwed over every friend, sibling, parent and cousin in his trajectory to the top, leaving Julian as his next and last of kin when the guy carked it.

“I heard about the merge with Northstar,” ventures Juno “Saffron, I mean. Did you lose much?”

“Depends on what terms we’re talking in. If we’re talking in shareholders and capitalist oligarch terms, then yes, the merge devastated me. But if we’re talking about ordinary life, Juno, then I’ll be more than comfortable for the rest of my natural life. Several natural lives in fact. I sent some of that home to Make-Make, and some of it I’m using right now to start over. A lot of people here are Martian too. It’s familiar. Just not so familiar that it’d make me feel trapped. It’s kind of funny, actually! I want to work again. Keep myself busy, you know? I ended up going back to sex work- on my terms this time, which is important. I’m up on the, uh, age-restricted side of the pleasure tier, Mondays through Thursdays and every other Saturday.”

A prickle of irritation makes Juno’s face flush again. For a moment, he truly hates Julian. Having all that money. He just said it. Enough for ‘several natural lives’. Has Julian ever known what it was like to go without? Make-Make is a solidly middle-class planet, hardly in need of his cash injection. To have the option of leaving his home-planet so early in life Julian had to have some kind of financial cushion, and even his first round of sex-work was comfortable because he landed in a lucky spot. 

Has he ever gone to bed hungry? Has he ever gone to bed full, but knowing it’s only because his brother went without? 

Jet brings him back to reality again. He cups Juno’s hand and massages the scarred knuckles with his thumb, mimicking a gesture he has seen Nureyev do many times.   
“I suppose I must confuse you, then.”

Julian smiles gratefully “Honestly, yes! I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable by asking, but, ah-”

Jet shakes his head “It is understandable. Juno didn’t disclose much personal information to his clients or friends.”

Friends is laying it on a bit thick. Juno barks Jet’s shin under the table to let him know this. 

But Julian brightens at being counted among Juno’s friends “Is your name actually Aileron?”

“No. We thought it best that we both used assumed names. My name is actually Emanoraq Maddsen. Juno and I met six years ago when I was transferred to Mars by my company. I must confess I fell in love immediately.”

Julian almost swoons out of his chair “That’s so sweet!”

“Well I didn’t exactly fall into your arms, did I? Honey.” says Juno through his teeth.

Jet squeezes his hand a little harder “I am of the opinion that the amount of work that went into our courtship made our eventual relationship much stronger. It was quite difficult, of course. Juno preferred to keep his private life very private and I worked outside of Hyperion for most of the year. I’m sorry if I am making this sound like I wore Juno down. It was more like a friendship where I made it clear that there was room for something else, if Juno ever reciprocated the feelings. When he did, we decided it was easier that I transfer to Hyperion, since his work was so dependent on the location. We lived mostly apart for the first three years. I was very worried about Juno’s safety, naturally. He was shot four times in the first year I knew him.”

The fucker. The absolute fucker. “To be fair, babe, that was in the same 48 hours. It was a busy weekend.”

“Of course, Juno is such a romantic at his core. The challenges just made him all the more determined to make it work between us.”

“I guess I just like a guy who can sweep me off my feet. Protect me and, hypothetically, preform complicated medical procedures on me- that was his old job, by the way. Emanoraq cross-trained as an engineer and a medic. He used to fix up race cars when he was growing up in,” fuck, fuck, where is Jet from? Earth! He knows the names of three places on earth. Goddammit! “England.”

Juno has no idea how stupid that answer might have been. Julian is so enraptured by the romance unspooling before his eyes that he only nods along “I didn’t know people raced in England. Isn’t most of it over on the continent, with the Grand Prix and such? My late husband and I attended that race a few times. Is there a big racing culture in England?”

Jet looks at Juno in askance “There was a robust one in my, ah, prefecture.”

“You mean the county?”

“Yes. What did I say? At any rate, Juno and I each grew tired of leading lives that were dictated so much by our work, and so separate at that. Juno was concerned that my being a visible presence in his life would put me in some danger.”

“He may look like a tank, but he’s vulnerable too. If he even looks at a tree-nut, his face gets blue and he’s gotta breathe through a straw. I used to get these terrible nightmares about one of my enemies breaking into his apartment and sprinkling cashews all over the place.”

“The long and short of it is that we eloped about a year ago. We decided a settler-satellite would be a good place for a fresh start, for both of us.”

Juno pastes on his home-maker smile and leans into Jet “It’s a weird world, huh, Julian? You never end up where you think you’re going to.”

“Thank god for small mercies. Well, I’d better go. I just wanted to drop in and let you know that your secret is safe with me, Mrs Ishtar Gosh.”

Juno’s mouth is beginning to hurt from the amount of smiling tonight has demanded of him “Thanks, Julian. What name are you using here?”

“Just my birth name. Damien Tui-Collins. Julian DiMaggio was a marketing tool just like my ‘Martian heritage’.”  
Doesn’t bode well for what Julian’s marriage must have been. 

Like a good couple of hosts, Jet and Juno wave Damien/Julian off until he has disappeared around the corner. Jet shuts the door. They each make a sound like a death rattle and separate. Jet gives himself a doggish shake and starts un-braiding his hair.

“That was,” he blows hair out of his mouth “The most nerve-wracking night I have ever been through and I have been through Space Hell. I was too stiff, wasn’t I? Those house-husbands could tell I’ve never had so much as a crush in my life, let alone…one of them asked me ‘what kind of sex do you have’ and I said ‘the standard kind’. Was that a strange answer?”

“Kinda.”

“I fear I came off more gym partner than husband.”

“I mean, you are my gym partner. But you were fine, Jet, you were fine! It was the fucking rest of them with all those fucking cheeseboards and the fucking wine that cost more than rent at my first apartment and the fucking kids named Eagle-Pigeon and Broth. Shit. Well, Julian doesn’t suspect shit, we know that. He didn’t even bring up the dead guy. I think we’re safe.”

“Good.” Jet grinds a knuckle across his eyes. For the first time, Juno realises how tired he must be from being on high alert all night. And that Jet looks irritated. “You did not have to mention my tree-nut allergy to Julian.”

“And you didn’t have to call me a romantic! You started it!”

“Please, Juno, we are in our thirties. We do not ‘start it’.”

“Oh yeah? Well, I’m forty, so- so respect your elders! By the way, Jet, where the hell are you from?”

“Utqiagvik. It’s one of the biggest cities in Inuit Nunavut, which is one of the smaller portions of the First Nations- Métis- Inuit Confederacy. Do any of these words mean anything to you?”

Juno shakes his head “Me? With my Martian public-school education?”

“I am almost afraid to ask my next question. Juno, do you know what ‘England’ is?”

“Some kind of…desert city, right? There’s pyramids near it.”

Solemn, Jet pats his shoulder “When this mission is over, we will sit down with an Earth atlas and a history book.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon: Jet and Nureyev don't really seem to know or like each other that well  
> Me: Jet and Nureyev are like a pair of roommates who used to share a dog when they lived in the same house, and now they co-parent the car-dog even though they live apart now
> 
> Canon: Nureyev is taller than Jet  
> Me: Jet is a big man in a sea of tiny, tiny babies
> 
> And for those of you wondering what 'Pakak' means and why Jet uses that name for Nureyev, I suggest googling Point Defiance Zoo and making your guesses from that. 
> 
> Let me know what y'all think about the chapter length. Too much? Too little?


	4. Why are the weird things always underground?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: emotional manipulation of an insecure teenager by parents: emotional manipulation of younger child by parent, insecurity over physical appearance by a teenager (specifically due to cystic acne), social pressure to drink (non-alcoholic), grieving for sibling
> 
> Suggested listening: Funeral Suits, 'All those friendly people'

The morning comes too quickly. Mainly because Juno stayed up ‘til about one trying to convince Jet that he didn’t need to keep watch over the house all night, and that some sleep would do him good. Juno isn’t sure of the last time Jet truly slept. It seems like all he’s had in the past week have been naps, and he can no longer dismiss that kind of disorder as a consequence of preparing for deep cover. So Juno goes to bed by himself and tries to calm his buzzing mind

Juno’s first mistake of the day is to assume that Kayrrine would give him some warning before picking him up, or choose an hour in which he was likely to be awake and ready. At 8:01 a.m. North-Io standard time, there is a noise at the door like a SWAT team. The rational part of Juno’s brain knows he is expecting company this morning- company whose central goal is to catch him unawares and harvest the various vulnerabilities and pains of his life for manipulation, and it is only natural that they would show up early after a late night. The irrational, sleep-deprived part tells Juno to find a blunt object and go out swinging because whatever made a meaty smear out of Treelore Jiwe is coming for him. 

And then he hears his alias, shrilled through the letterbox “Ishtar! Hello? Ishtar are you awake? Be and dear and let me in! I’ve got something for you.”

Juno mutes a groan with his palms “Shit. Uh, I think I made plans with Kayrrine.”  
He turns to see if Jet is awake and finds that he is alone and has probably been alone for most of the night. 

Jet didn’t come to bed at all. Or, if he did, he slept on the couch. Wrapping himself in a floral robe, Juno staggers out, pulling the silk from his hair and a patch over his eye, but Kayrrine’s invasion has already begun. A small jungle crouches on the coffee-table: an absolute profusion of hot-house flowers that have already expelled a series of heady perfumes, which quickly coagulate in Juno’s stomach and turn it several times. This must be the latest in a series of welcoming gifts. ‘Love-bombing’ is the term which Buddy used to describe the strategy. This concrete reminder that Juno and his fake-husband are already very much in the process of being indoctrinated creeps him out so much that it is all he can do not to crawl back into bed, leaving Jet to carry on the investigation on his own. 

He finds Kayrrine talking with Jet in the kitchen who, if he is unnerved by his unexpected breakfast guest, does not let it show. 

“…which is why Ishtar and I can’t watch anything filmed in Hoosegow anymore.”

Kayrrine nods along “I should read that article. It sounds well-researched. Oh, well, here he is.”

She is pleased to have caught him off-guard, with his boxers and an unsexy negligee peering out of a robe that was clearly pinched from a hotel (Nureyev’s donation) so, yeah, Juno has gotta admit that he does not look good right now. 

Staggering to Jet’s side, Juno wraps an arm around his waist and hangs off him. Half affectionately, half because he will fall over if he does not have something to hold onto. 

“Good morning love. We were just discussing the Kanagawa network and why you and I don’t watch it anymore.”  
Jet drops a kiss on the crown of his head and presses a fresh cup of coffee into Juno’s hand. Juno would kill and die for this man. 

Kayrrine smiles at him. A crawling sort of smile, reminding Juno vaguely and nonsensically of a centipede. She wants to communicate that she does not hold his weird egress of last night against him, but that she will remember it. Is Juno Steel embarrassed about crawling through three rooms in front of a bunch of strangers? Not as badly as Ishtar Gosh. 

Juno has to slug from the coffee before he can talk “Too many adds. Sensationalism. The son took over the archaeology stream to find a new place for his murder-show so it’s not really educational anymore.”

“Yes, that was the gist.” 

“Why don’t you get changed, honey? It sounds like you have big plans this morning.”

Well, if Jet wants to be left alone with Kayrrine then Juno is not about to deprive him of the experience. He shuffles off burdened with coffee and despair. On the bright side, he gets a chance to eavesdrop; either Kayrrine doesn’t realise how well sound is carried through these houses when they are still relatively empty, or more likely, she wants Ishtar to hear what she is saying to his husband. 

“…surprised by his reaction to Damien, I have to admit.”

“As was I,” Jet is a good actor when it comes to faking discomfort- possibly because he is always a little bit uncomfortable “But Ishtar explained the nature of their relationship to me. It was not romantic. It was merely…complicated, due to other factors. He was not expecting to see Damien again. 

“That’s unfortunate. Does Ishtar not get along with Damien? Because I can make arrangements so they won’t have to run into each other that often.”

Stepping into slacks, Juno curses her under his breath. Stupid creepy cult leader. What doesn’t that even mean? Is she gonna lock one of them in a basement?

“Oh I wouldn’t ask you to go that far. They get along perfectly fine. It was just a surprise to meet each other again so far away from Mars.” an artful pause “However, if I am honest…Ishtar had never told me about Damien before. It was a little rough to have such a surprise at the end of a day that was running long already because of the move. Like I said, the relationship with Damien doesn’t exactly make me feel, well, insecure, but it does make me wonder why my wife would hide such a thing from me. It makes me wonder what else he might be hiding.”

Oh, she likes that. Juno can just about hear Kayrrine salivating on the shag carpeting, she likes that so much. 

“It can be hard to feel valued in your marriage.”

“Sometimes. Thank you for the flowers. They’re lovely.”

“Not at all! I grew them myself. I keep a greenhouse. Keeps me busy when Tsuper-Tsonic is at school and the wife is at work, you know. I should show it to you sometimes.”  
Jesus, that’s all Jet needs. An afternoon trapped with his two least favourite things: humidity and suburbanites.

Juno saves him from having to accept the invitation. Today he has dressed in floral slacks (which he intends to burn after this mission is over) and a cardigan over a t-shirt. His thinking is that he will be more difficult to seize if he wears loose clothing. What they will seize him for, Juno doesn’t know, but he does know that he won’t go down without using Nureyev’s terrible ring like a knuckle-duster. 

“Have a good day, honey. I should be done at orientation before two. I’ll call you, ok?”

They part with a side-armed hug that would look too awkward and bro-ish had Jet not just given Kayrrine a very good reason for feeling distant from his wife. Juno pretends to lean in for a proper kiss and then to be hurt when Jet leans out of his reach. It is a performance that would make Buddy proud and move Rita to tears.   
Kayrrine’s early arrival was a nasty surprise, but the crowd in the car is worse. The kid, Tsuper-Tsonic, sits sullen in between Nadeing and Jiorjah and uses a very fancy tablet to ignore them. Nadeing smiles behind thick sunglasses and sips from a lidless cup of chunky stuff. It looks like one of those products that creep into Hyperion via Mons, trickling down from the upper-class. A drink that balances your chakras and purges the methanol from your brain in the same gulp, makes you shit crystals later.

“You go ahead and take shot-gun, Ishtar.”

“Are you sure?”

Kayrrine glances into the back-seat “I’m sure the others don’t mind.”

Jiorjah shakes their head. Nadeing is too far into the fog of her hang-over to engage in the conversation. Juno considers the wisdom of putting his back to two people who may very well have killed Treelore Jiwe. Of getting into the car of the woman who leads the cult and most definitely ordered Jiwe’s death. And then he thinks, fuck it, if I survived an actual Martian menace then I can survive these people and their mind games.

Soup watches Juno buckle in and try to get comfortable on the plastic seat cover. Her attention is drawn to the crater of scar-tissue around his missing eye and, by God, if Juno weren’t undercover, he would turn around and push the split eyelids apart and show the kid what the inside of a skull looks like. This strategy has worked great on kids and tactless adults alike.

“How’d you lose your eye?” blurts Soup.

“Tsuper-Tsonic! We do not comment on other people’s bodies!” Kayrrine snaps.

Nadeing laughs again. She is still a little drunk. 

“It’s ok, I can tell her.” Juno musses his hair to cover the scars “If that’s ok with you?”

Chewing on her lower lip, Kayrrine sighs “She might not stop asking otherwise.”

Juno swivels around to face the kid “Well, Soup, have you ever dropped a little rock over the side of a bridge or a high-rise?”

She shakes her head. As one, she and Jiorjah lean in with bated breath.

“Where I’m from a lot of kids like to do that. They try to hit cars and startle people. One day, I was walking home from work and there happened to be some kids playing that game. I looked up at the exact instant one of them dropped a rock. It was a million-to-one accident that the rock hit me, but it did and…” Juno mimes an explosion over his right eye.

Soup’s mouth is open “Is it still in there?”

Jiorjah is just horrified “How come it didn’t pierce through to your brain?”

“Ok, ok, that’s enough.” Kayrrine gives her daughter a look in the mirror “Now I don’t want you to ask Mrs Gosh anymore questions about his eye. How would you like it if he asked you about your problems all the time?”

That comment deflates the kid like a hot-air balloon in a dog-fight. She sits back and raises the tablet in front of her so as not to have to look at her mother. With an ache of pity and kinship in his chest, Juno turns around too. He has a feeling he might come to hate Kayrrine.

Juno pretends to be fascinated by the two tiers over their heads “I’ve never lived in a tiered city before. Never left Olympus Mons much.”

“It makes me sea-sick. They kind of drift. I prefer solid ground. Me and the husband don’t leave tier-one very much unless we’re working.” says Jiorjah

“We’re on a satellite,” says Soup, and Juno can tell she is about to start a well-versed argument “The ground’s only solid for, like, a hundred metres, and then it’s hollow, and then it’s space.”

Kayrrine shakes her head indulgently “Tsuper wants to be an engineer when she grows up. She knows all about the satellite’s structure. You’re going to build your own satellite when you get big, aren’t you, Tsuper?”

Soup doesn’t even look at her mother “No, I’m gonna build animatronics and put ‘em in a park and I’m gonna make ‘em chase people I don’t like.”

“Do you mean robots?” says Jiorjah, taking the object out of their pocket.   
Immediately, Juno recognises it as one half of a high-end baby monitor, designed so that its owner can check up on their kid in real-time from as far as another hemisphere. Vespa stole herself one just like it for the medbay so she can watch her crew, when someone is laid up on bed rest. She enforces this with a jury-rigged speaker so she can shout at her patients when she sees a rule being bent. 

“No, I mean animatronics. Animatronics are s’posed to represent real things and do what they would do-”

“Talk properly, Tsuper. It’s pronounced ‘supposed’. Do you need to go back into elocution lessons?”

Soup is quiet for the five minutes it takes for Kayrrine’s private car to pick its way around the lanes and the tramlines to her nanny’s house. It strikes Juno as a horrific waste of space and electricity to have a vehicle chewing up space when the public transport reaches everywhere, fully accessible all the way. He is so busy thinking about what kind of an ego it has to take to want a car in a settlement where nothing is more than ten minutes away by tram that, when they stop in front of the murder scene, it shocks him.

‘Murder scene’ is no longer a correct description of the place. Every inch of the blacktop and the tramline cutting through it has been scrubbed clean of blood so that not even an oxidised stain marks the spot. Treelore Jiwe’s corpse-smear was stretched from the sidewalk, across the tramlines and almost reached the opposite side of the road. Of course, not even the clumsiest of cults would leave two metres of gore on the street as evidence of their wrong-doing. It just shocks Juno how normal the spot manages to be and makes him wonder how many other places like it saw a brutal murder that had no one to investigate, no one brave enough to acknowledge the violence. 

His stomach flips as, with a hurried goodbye, Soup climbs over Nadeing and runs across the murder scene to get to the house where that same, pale nanny from last night is waiting. 

He looks at Kayrrine, and she looks past him, to her daughter, but not at her daughter, at the spot, and right then Juno concludes that Kayrrine carried the murder out. Maybe she did it herself with some kind of monstrous weapon released into the worlds by the new generation of M’tenderes. Maybe she ordered it done. Whatever the case, Juno knows two things: it was her decision, and she watched it happen.

Kayrrine moves suddenly, which makes Juno start. But she is just reaching for Nadeing’s drink “Give me a sip. I’m parched.”

Nadeing straightens up, saying her first coherent words “Sure. I’m full anyway. You can finish it.”

She removes her sunglasses and is revitalised, somehow, like dying grass wet from a hard rain. The glow of health seems to have intensified on her skin in the last couple of minutes.

Kayrrine slugs from the drink. Juno notices a tremor in her hand as she raises the cup, which gentles and stops after her second dram. He does not like the way she drinks. The hungry, thoughtless way she finishes off the cup and, as they wait for a tram to pass, shakes the last drops into her open mouth.

At least he knows what the supplement looks like. Jet will probably encounter it today as well. 

Jiorjah talks while they watch whatever’s on the other end of the baby monitor “So, Ishtar, I was talking to your husband a little last night. He says you two have been married for a year.”

Juno finds himself leaning into the door on his side, away from Kayrrine “Yeah. We ended up eloping, actually. He has a big family and they can be a bit messy at events like weddings. It was easier just to do a courthouse. We’d been together for so long it felt like nothing changed.”

“That’s how you know it’s a good marriage. So many people these days expect marriage to fix all the problems in the relationship. Like, I’m sorry, but if you were dating a cheater, then you’re gonna divorce a cheater.” Nadeing laughs and shows Juno her hand, where there is a pale strip on the ring finger “Can you tell I’m a little bitter about mine?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, yeah, I was too. Now I’m just mad. Soon I’ll be ambivalent and then I’ll be onto the next one.”

“How did you find out?” asks Juno. If Kayrrine’s guests get to ask about his and Jet’s fake sex-life, then he gets to ask about Nadeing’s messy divorce.

“Oh, I didn’t find out, per se. It’s just a feeling. He’d been distant for a bit and then he suddenly picked up and left me. No warning. Not even a goodbye to our son. I went to bed beside him and I woke up a single mother.”

His insides are cold. Slowly, he twists around to meet Nadeing’s eyes. 

She smiles at him and shrugs “What are you gonna do, though? Treelore made his choice. I just hope he doesn’t think he can come crawling back to me in a month when his new piece of ass does the same thing to him.”

The Wellness Centre comes up a lot sooner than Juno expects. It is a non-descript building, anonymous in a way that suggests laziness rather than attempting to keep a low-profile. Like whoever came here with whatever plans did not expect them to take off as quickly as they did, and so everything has an air of haste to it. A couple of lawn-care drones patrol past in a line as neat as soldiers’, trimming hedges that are already sculpted at right angles. Handfuls of drone-parrots cluster together in the trees about the place. Actually, Juno judges there is a small murder hidden away in the foliage. Someone is watching this place very closely.  
La Charladora could only give them certain pieces of information. For example while it is true that Kayrrine Takagi’s family and several of the others involved in the cult brought a lot of investment to the satellite, it is unclear how aware the true authority of The Platonium are of what the Wellness Centre gets up to. Satellites get built by investors who want their businesses on the upper tiers and don’t really care about whom populates the level beneath, so long as they leave space for their workers and give their patronage to the businesses. Still it is hard to imagine they missed that murder. The drones could be for the authority’s benefit. Or they could be controlled by the cultists- perhaps Jiorjah was watching through the parrots’ eyes on their baby monitor.

A plaque is mounted on the door that names the place and its foundation as some five years ago, a few months after the satellite was opened. This is the only thing which would clue a stranger into the fact that a murdering cult operates out of the building, apart from the people who come in and out of the building. Looking at them with a fresher eye, Juno decides that the healthful glow and the face they all seem to share creates the impression of people drawn by a hand which is unfamiliar with how actual people look and move. And none of them look like murderers. Juno knows by experience what a murderer looks like. At first glance they are ordinary. At second glance there are tells, to a trained eye. And if you pick up on these tells and you go in for a third glance to confirm that, yeah, that’s a murderer, for Juno, the next thing you do is run towards or away from them.   
Juno still wants to run. He wants to run screaming back to Number 4 and crawl under the bed. He wants to call Buddy and yell at her for putting them in this situation. He wants to travel back in time to yell at himself from a few weeks ago for consenting to be put into this situation. Most of all, he just wants Nureyev to be beside him and to tell him that it’s going to be ok with the unflappable confidence that Juno loves and envies. But Nureyev isn’t here and Jet won’t hear him if he screams for help. 

Suck it up, little monster, he thinks. You’ll be fine.

There are a surprising amount of normal people inside of the building. Kayrrine’s entrance into the building causes a flutter of interest which is quickly disguised, so as not to betray her true importance to these uninitiated. A couple of them glance at her and give her neighbourly smiles. The cultists side-eye her and the lieutenants, and lastly Juno, who seems to confuse them. Kayrrine’s interest in Juno is unusual for the speed with which she pursues him. Cult recruitment is usually a much longer process. Gotta leave time for the love-bombing to sink in, to stagger out introducing the weirdness so as not to strain credulity. Kayrrine keeps making these ham-fisted overtures and Juno keeps accepting them because Ishtar doesn’t know how to say no to people, but if this were the real world then Kayrrine’s   
enthusiasm would have already scared him off.

Looping her arm through his, Kayrrine leads him through an airy lobby filled with fake succulents, down a hallway where there are even more succulents mounted in wall sconces and steers him into a kitchenette where, incredibly, they have found more room for fake succulents. The sheer amount of plastic leaves in the building has put so much dust into the air that every movement from every person plumes more of it up. There is no chance for it to collect on any surface because the dust is constantly disturbed by cultists loping in and out of the labyrinthine backrooms.   
The kitchenette would be a nice space if not for the dust, all white ceramic and black chrome with an island where Persimmon the treasurer is nursing a cup of supplement over a tablet. Nadeing peels off from the group and stoops to speak to her in a low tone, and does not seem happy about what she hears back. One of the wellness chefs, Taira, blocks the sink as he scrolls through another tablet. The screen’s brightness is turned down so that it cannot be read over his shoulder, but Juno is a master snooper. He catches the fragments of ‘…delayed production schedule’ and ‘quarterly review’ before Kayrrine turns him around, physically, and offers him a shot of the supplement.

Literally, in a shot glass.

“What’s in it?” says Juno.

She doesn’t look at him as she replies. Past him, at Jiorjah, who has pulled Taira aside to whisper to him as well. Their tablet has disappeared. “Healthy things. It builds your immunity and helps you detox.”

Detox? Jesus. Vespa warned him about this buzzword. Vespa told him that if anyone suggests he do a detox, he should kill them and all those in the immediate area to prevent the stupid from spreading.   
“Your body gets rid of toxins on its own,” she was very close to his face when she said this “All organs do it except for the brain. If the brain absorbs something stupid, that’s it. It’s in there forever. Unless you knock the stupid out. By which I mean knock the brain out.”

“No thanks,” says Juno “I feel a little out of sorts from last night.”

Kayrrine pushes the shot towards him “This is just the thing to get you right again.”

Politely, Juno pushes it back “Really, I’m ok. Maybe later.”

“Hey, Kay-Kay.” Jiorjah calls, their arm about Taira’s shoulders “Sounds like we can go down whenever we’re ready.”

Oh, goddammit. Juno knew he was going to end up subterranean at some point during this investigation because this sort of shit is always buried. He was just hoping that it wouldn’t be so early in the mission. Or at the damn least, that he wasn’t gonna be alone when the inevitable underground-lair came up. Stupid orientation, stupid fake job, stupid Jet, probably getting to do an EVA walk while Juno has to schlep into a murder-basement with a bunch of juiced-up, ableist lunatics. 

Kayrrine smiles “Ok! Give me five. Here, Ishtar, take my tablet for a sec. This is a list of the ingredients in the supplement. You can read that while I run to the office.”

Glad of the chance to prepare himself for whatever is coming next, Juno pretends to read the list. It’s a lot of organic this and non-GMO that. If any of these ingredients have ever so much as come close a single batch of the supplement, Juno will eat his eye-patch. He watches the lieutenants and the other two over the rim of the tablet, and the figures in the dusty hall beyond. Every now and then he scrolls along and takes a slightly exaggerated interest in an item. He cannot hear what they are saying. He just knows the information has to be sensitive to what they’re doing, obvious too, if they don’t want even the freshest stranger in from the street to hear about it. 

And then a kid comes in. A kid, lead on the arm of a woman with some peon role in the cult, looking just enough like them to be their parent or sibling. Holding fast to the kid while a cultist gives a sort of sales-pitch introduction to the supplement. The person giving the pitch is the Buckley who pounded so many crab-cakes the night before. So he does have a role, apart from devouring his own weight in seafood.  
“…won’t have a problem with your skin anymore. Acne sucks, I know. I had some when I was your age.”

The kid makes an obvious effort not to touch the spots on their cheeks, which are cystic “How old were you when it cleared up?”

Buckley exchanges a look with the mother or the sister “How old are you now?”

“Uh, fifteen.”

“It happened for me when I was seventeen.”

Their face falls “I don’t want to wait that long. I feel like…I don’t know, I just don’t want to have it anymore.”

“It sounds like you’d do well with the supplement, then. What do we think, Mom?”

The mother smiles and rubs her kid’s arm “I’m happy to start when you are, honey. I think it’d be great to get your skin nice and pretty and clear.”

Briefly, the kid meets Juno’s stare. A hand goes up to the densest patch of acne, over their left cheek. Juno looks away quickly. If he attempts to soften his face and appear encouraging, then it will seem more like he is trying to cover his ass after being caught staring than genuine. 

“Please, Mom.” says the kid.

At that moment, Kayrrine returns. Juno is almost glad to see her. She is visibly disappointed that he did not take the shot while she was away.

Taking her tablet back, Kayrrine offers her arm again “Come on, Ishtar. We wanna show you something we’ve got in the basement.”

Suddenly Jiorjah is on his other arm. Juno is frog-marched the way they came. On the bright side, this means he passes out of earshot before Juno can hear the rest of the exchange between the kid and the Buckley.

Goddammit. Goddammit. What’s wrong with these people? Who lets their kid hear that they’re ugly and, instead of telling them how wrong and stupid that is, makes them believe it? 

Juno is so mad it takes him a minute to realise Kayrrine is talking to him: “…kind of at the centre of what we want to achieve at the Centre. It’s gonna be a confronting experience, but definitely worth it. Wouldn’t you say so, Jiorjah?”

“Of course,” they say, opening a heavy door onto a narrow staircase “I had a hard time the first I went through it. Took me a day or so to process what I’d really seen, you know? But by the time I had, I couldn’t wait to really join in here on the good work.”

Kayrrine starts down first and Jiorjah gives him a little push, so Juno is trapped between them in single-file. 

“Sorry about how dark it is.” Kayrrine’s blonde hair is ghost-like in the dimness, bobbing in and out of sight “We need to keep it down here or the, uh, the production line will get damaged. It’s really photosensitive.”

Now this isn’t the first time Juno has followed a couple of creepy people into a basement. With the way his life is going, it won’t be the last. Juno cannot help but smile to himself. God, what a life. Wouldn’t Benzaiten be proud of him?   
He descends into the blackness, confident in his ability to handle whatever comes next. 

This is Juno’s second mistake. 

(the Carte Blanche)

“I just realised I have played myself.”

Rita pauses the stream. Cecil Kanagawa is frozen with his mouth open, his flesh hand grasping his rappelling harness, his metal hand grasping an antique dagger which he has been holding for an hour but not yet justified. He seems to like just having it.

“Say what?” says Nureyev.

Buddy is calling from the kitchen “I said, darling, I’ve played myself by sending Jet away.”

“Still not getting ya, Miss Buddy.” says Rita.

“I had him put the tin of the ‘good stuff’ on the highest shelf so that I cannot reach it, nor access it, without first explaining to him why I believe I need it. And now I find myself in dire need of it and I’ve sent Jetffrey to the other side of the solar system. In short, I am saying I have been a blind fool and I expect to be destroyed by my own short-sighted egoism at any moment.”

The ‘good stuff’ is the one solid foodstuff which Buddy can consume without also causing multiple organ failure. It is a kind of chocolate called ‘Event Horizon’ on account of it being made from a strand of cocoa bean so darkly bitter that it has been known to induce the same system shutdowns as strong doses of capsaicin can. Only the foolhardy or misinformed would consider it a food. Hence, it is Buddy’s occasional treat, and a strictly rationed one because Event Horizon is as difficult to import as plutonium. 

“Would you like me to get the tin for you?”

“No thank you, Peter. I’ve thought the better of it now.” 

Buddy floats into the room with a drama that reminds Nureyev of a teenager getting ready to fling themselves onto a bed for a good cry and sprawls down beside him. The force of her weight hitting the cushions suddenly pushes air over to Nureyev’s side and pops him up, nearly into the air, like a kid on a corner of an air-mattress. A broad arm wraps around Nureyev’s shoulders- Buddy is such a voracious cuddler that she doesn’t even realise she’s doing it.   
The Buddy Aurinko known to the rest of the world is very different from the person she is when home. The elegance and the significant cleavage remains, but the slinky dresses are traded for flannels unbuttoned to the stomach and high-water khakis, and her hair goes up into a red bun that lists to the side. She takes up a lot of space and if she happens to obtain it, will not give up ‘the clicker’, as she calls the TV remote, for love nor money. This is, after all, her ship, and on Buddy’s ship only educational programming gets screen-time. If the crew want to watch trashy streams or reality TV or public executions, they may do so in their own rooms.

She squints at the TV. Her cybernetic eye makes a sound like an analogue camera-lens as it focuses.

“Rita, why on earth is that hideous little man on the TV again? Have we no taste aboard this ship?”

Rita shrugs “It’s interestin’! The site he’s on is just outside ‘a Hyperion, the one what they got that Death Mask from. It’s the necropolis his father discovered after Mistah Steel said that thing to him.”

Buddy cocks an eyebrow “What?”

“Well, Mistah Steel told Croesus Kanagawa to go dig a big hole an’ sit in it or somethin’, then ol’ man Kanagawa busted him in the lip, then he did it anyway ‘cos spite’s a powerful feelin’ and before ya know it the man’s found himself a whole Martian necropolis! Here, I’ll show you!”

Rita messes with the screen so that it moves back by a few dozen frames. Cecil moves in reverse until he is poised on the edge of the precipice once more, and the necropolis hunkers beneath him. Much of it remains beneath the sand and the soil. A few spires of stone have been dug out, crouching in uncanny shapes that suggest organic material rather than stone. It is quite obviously the tip of an iceberg, part of which might even be beneath Hyperion, and that can be guessed even though the ultrasound technology isn’t working on it for some reason. Nureyev has only been listening with one ear, focused as he is on their banking, but he is pretty sure he heard Cecil say that he wouldn’t mind ‘moving’ a bit of the city to get the whole of the necropolis out. 

“You can’t say that don’t inspire somethin’ in ya!”

Buddy squints at the necropolis over Cecil’s velveteen shoulder “Disgust that he would dress like that to dig about in an ancient alien grave.”

“Aw, come on, Miss Buddy, you’re just tryin’ not to have fun now! If it bothers ya so much we could always watch the elections. I was gonna watch ‘em in my room later on. Well, the round-up, ‘cos elections real-time make me so nervous I get a fluttery stomach, an’ I even turned off my phone so Franny won’t try to update me, but we ain’t gotta watch this if Cecil makes you that mad.”

She makes a dismissive gesture “Oh, darling, don’t let me ruin your fun. Let the nasty little man do his show. It’s just the thing to take my mind off the mission. At the very least it will distract me until Vespa gets back.”

Buddy always gets antsy when Vespa leaves the ship without her, whether it’s a mission or like today a supply run. It is somewhere between cute and tragic; definitely a reaction to their traumatic separation, but also kind of sweet to see two weathered, wearied old criminals brightening like children at the sight of each other even if they were only apart for a five-minute bathroom break. 

Rita forwards the stream back to the spot she paused it and unfreezes Cecil Kanagawa, who continues down into the pit, talking to the camera as he is winched down by some unseen and unpaid intern. CameramenTM stream past him in either direction. Every now and then the camera passes a human worker hanging in a harness, looking just as feral and tired as their monstrous co-workers. 

“…not only an idea site for the upcoming Season Two of ‘From the Jaws of Death’, but it’s got some kind of cultural value too, according to our research department.” Cecil looks up and yells to someone at the top of the pit “Whose culture? Te, whose culture? We’re the Martians now...ok, they’re gesturing for me to – oh, Te, that’s very rude!”

“How are we doing?” says Buddy.

Nureyev shrugs “A bit bloated. I think it was the cream in the frittatas last night.”

“I was asking about the numbers. Would you like a Pepto?”

“Oh, sorry. I will be fine in a minute.”

“-what are we gonna do with the mayoral candidates that don’t get into office if not feature them in one of our educational programmes? A programme for the Kanagawa Network is a public service, after all! But because City Hall hates fun it looks like we’ll have to go back to recruiting from the debtors and students for the next round of ‘My Hands Are Knives: The Boxing Tournament’-”

“We’re just into the green,” Nureyev shows her the calculations he has drawn over the statements with a stylus “We have wiggle room with about 40,000 credits. Not much, if anything major goes wrong. The sooner Vespa figures out where she wants to house the production operation the sooner I can tell you whether we need to sneak in another job before Juno and Jet are back. The way I figure it, either we will have to use extremely underpaid workers or pro-bono workers. I don’t know of a surplus of highly trained medical professionals with experience in mass-producing medication that will also lend their services for free.”

“- can see here where the future site of the JoD coliseum is planned. Well you can’t quite see it because there’s so much sand in the air and something is on fire, but if you just imagine a nice open-air structure over where those gentlethems with the blowtorches are-”

Buddy bites her bottom lip, taking the tablet from him “I know of a handful. The people who set up the Hanataba network will be persuaded if we can figure out who the devil they are. Jet knows one or two, I think.”

“As do I. Well, Perseus Shah does.”

“Oh, really?” Buddy smiles and squeezes his shoulder “Sorry, darling, I forget how many of ‘you’ there are. Well done.”

Nureyev tries not to let on how happy that little compliment makes him. In his experience, if someone knows that you crave their approval they are bound to use it against you.   
“As soon as I can get ahold of Jet, I will compare our contacts and see about reaching out. It would be prudent of us to draw up a list that everyone can see, I think, in case something happens to one of us.”

“As long as you’re sure about it.”

“No sense in guarding our resources at this stage of the game.”

“- foreshadows doom, if you really think about it. People who doom-monger inevitably get it brought down on them and then whine, oh, why me, why me! Because, friend, you’ve spent the last decade predicting this! Self-fulfilling prophecy is not just a pop-psychologist’s buzzword, it is a real world effect! Anyway, that’s why I prefer not to listen to the naysayers who insist that our ambitious project could lead to a cave-in on the outskirts of the Scar borough-”

“At any rate, if we can find staff that are qualified and trustworthy enough to let them alone for the lion’s share of the production work, a few more jobs should keep us above water. We should aim for small-scale heists of high value items. Less Zolatovna, more of letting Rita defraud billionaires.”

Rita grins; she has been listening with one ear “My favourite thing ta do on a slow afternoon.”

“Alright. When Vespa gets back, she and I will identify a few targets. Let me know if anything comes to mind.” 

If Jet and Juno were still here, Nureyev would already be picking their brains. In spite of his newness to the whole criminal thing, Juno can design an air-tight heist when he puts his mind to it- his versatility and cleverness never cease to amaze Nureyev. Like watching a storm; you see the clouds and expect the rain, but you can never truly predict exactly how the storm will move.  
And as for Jet, well, Nureyev has been using that man as a sounding board for everything from heist plans to aliases since they met towards the beginning of Jet’s career. Jet’s friendship is the only one Nureyev has maintained for the duration of his career. Many times, he has thought of what a liability having the Unnatural Disaster as his friend represents, reformed or no, and how easy it would be to sever the connection. Before coming to the Carte Blanche it was always him who reached out to Jet because he left no way for Jet to reach back. Still, the day that Jet is taken down it is possible he will drag a good number of his network with him. That might include Nureyev if he is unlucky. 

And yet, every time Nureyev considered it, he also thought about what it would be like to never again have the option of picking up a com and reaching across the universe and, without fail, having that tired voice in his ear: “Still alive, Pakak?”

Shutting off the tablet, Nureyev lets himself rest against Buddy. She, in turn, relaxes and allows him to just kind of sink into the fleshy flannel folds of her side. Jet is a private person too. He wonders if Jet ever clued Buddy in as to how long they have known each other. He hopes not. This woman is already so close to the core of him. Nureyev doesn’t see why she should get there so quickly. He may keep some of his secrets, whether they are as simple and innocent as the twenty years of awkward, easy friendship with Jet, or as damning as what he almost did to Brahma.

Nureyev is a man who contains multitudes. If Buddy is patient, she may have the chance to explore those. But having this boundary up doesn’t mean that Nureyev can’t slump into her and watch a Kanagawa gambol about Martian ruins, missing his partner just as Buddy misses hers. 

(The Platonium)

Juno takes the tram and walks half a kilometre home. He tries a few times without success to dial Jet- his hands are shaking so hard he can’t use the touchscreen. Jet isn’t picking up. Worse than that his coms can’t reach any of the numbers for the Carte Blanche. Juno understands that he is alone and quickens his pace. All the way home he feels the eyes of the drone-birds follow him. 

He disrobes in the hall, shedding his layers in a trail to the shower. Juno stops at the sink and grasps it, leaning on it against a wave of nausea. The face he has worn for forty years does not feel like his, but a reminder, a hook that keeps opening up the scabbed-over wound so that the pain is suddenly be as fresh as the moment it was when he burst into his brother’s bedroom and saw that Sarah had really done as she said. 

A film has settled over Juno’s skin. A few inches of scum, thickest over his joints and his eyes, compressing his body in on itself. Juno feels his ribs contract around his organs. His lungs shrivel and bruise. His brain is crushed and in a moment will begin dripping from his nose and mouth.

Juno turns the water up to its highest pressure and makes it as hot as he can stand. 

The first thing he does is scrub the foundation from his arm. His tattoo sleeve appears rivulet by rivulet. First the mild, doe-eyes of the goddess meet his stare, and then the shamisen which she strums across his bicep, and lastly the white dragon which rests at her feet, its face tucked behind the folds of her kimono. The dragon looks like an extension of her at first glance. A tail. The train of her outfit.   
He wonders if the dragon at Polaris Park took some inspiration from the one which Benzaiten is sometimes depicted with. Perhaps Sarah didn’t recognise the resemblance when she was drawing up Andromeda’s rouge gallery. She just poured herself out onto the page and maybe she couldn’t help it that her sons turned up in the worst of her stories’ demons. 

Juno wipes the last droplets of foundation-coloured water from Benzaiten’s face and holds his arm above his head, the goddess angled against the light. 

This is Benzaiten. He, his face was shared with Benzaiten. These are the two pieces of Benzaiten Steel that survive and that has been true for the last twenty-one years. Juno has nothing else.

Which means that Juno did not see what he just saw. 

What he remembers seeing cannot be true.

What they showed him in the basement of the Wellness centre is impossible.

“Ishtar!”

Jet is out of breath. He must have sprinted to Number 4 from wherever he was.

He tries again “Juno!” and then he hears the sound of the shower, and the door flies open.

Jet shields his eyes “Sorry- I thought you were hurt. Do you need me to call Pakak?”

Silently, Juno turns the water off and steps out of the shower. He tries to speak, not even registering Jet’s offer to get ahold of Nureyev.

Wrapping a towel around him, Jet makes him sit on the edge of the tub. He holds Juno’s hand as Juno collects his wits. Finds his voice.

“I saw him.” Juno says at last “At first I thought it was a…a reflection.”

“What did you see?” Jet’s voice is very gentle. 

Juno gestures along his sleeve “Him. My baby brother. You didn’t know I have a brother because I never talk about him because he died. He died bad.”

Kneeling, Jet lets him talk. Jet listens to Juno stutter his way through the story he has told twice in his entire life; once to the investigators that came for statements and Sarah, once to Nureyev.   
Most of the time the story is told to him. Hyperion City knows and loves to remember it as much as Juno wants to forget it. And Jet, he behaves as if he somehow missed the defining tragedy of Juno’s life in researching him. He listens like the dead brother and the grey woman who hanged herself in a holding cell are all new information.

By the end of it, Juno is crying. 

Jet draws his sleeve over Juno’s eye and sighs with his entire body “I am sorry.”

“Shit, Jet, me too. I’m fucking sorry he’s dead. I’m fucking sorry I kill him every day because I never talk about him because…it hurts. And I hate being in pain. And I’m selfish. And I thought I was getting to a place where I could think about him without twisting the knife but I’m still a goddamned wreck.”

“Juno, you have every right to be a wreck. You carry an inexpressible pain.”

“I just expressed it all over the goddamned place.”

“And how do you suppose you are to carry the pain? There are no rules for that kind of grief. No one should begrudge you what you must do to survive with it.” then, softer, Jet offers “Honestly, Juno, in the spectrum of grief that comes with losing a sibling, I think you’re far into the rational end. I’m sure a part of what made me so…so eager to disappear into carnage was losing one of my siblings.”

Somehow, Juno isn’t surprised. Grief lives differently in every person but it doesn’t stop being grief. And it is never so cleverly hidden as it thinks, especially to people who know what to look for.

Juno grits his teeth. If he doesn’t explain what he saw it will choke him. 

“Imagine that the sibling you lost just…so they take you into a room under the Wellness centre and you don’t think twice about it because, fuck it, you’re strong, you can deal with it. And then it gets a little dark. A little foggy. They get you to stand in the centre of the room and you’re still going along with it because you think you have the upper hand. Then something moves in the black at the back of the room. And then…what was their name?”

“His name was YJ.”

“Imagine YJ walks out of the mist. And you know you’re not seeing things. You know that is a real body and a real person walking towards you because they touch your arm-” Juno drops his face into his hands. His voice breaks “And you run.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that was seventeen goddamned pages. This chapter was a hard one to write because it just didn't seem to want to stop. Anyway, I wonder what's in that basement?


	5. Dr Trashsquatch, MD

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: detailed discussion of chronic illness, brief discussion of medical procedures in the past and happening within the scene (non-invasive), description of intense chronic pain episode, brief description of needles/injections in a medical setting
> 
> Suggested listening: Ojos de sol, by Y la bamba (the title song, but the whole album is good)

Before there was the Angel, there was something called the Brahmese Quartet. Except because the founding families of the Brahmese settlements are idiots, the Quartet never went away even when a different and arguably more effective measure of population-control had been introduced. No one is quite sure how the Quartet was introduced into the population. If the founding families know, they aren’t saying and they aren’t using their information to scale back the mortality rates. The nameless city beneath New Kinshasa has the highest of the three urban centres on Brahma because it also has the highest rate of Motor Neuron Disease, which can take a person out within a year of its activation. In a way Nureyev is pretty lucky that he got the least fatal and most manageable of the Quartet. 

Still, it is hard to think of himself as lucky when a stabbing pain wakes him from a dead sleep. Nureyev cannot move for the first few minutes of the attack. A pulsing pain pins him to the mattress, unable to reach for any of the management devices that sit just over on the night-stand. He can only breathe in, out, in, out, and fumble his way through a silent du'aa’ al-mas'alah that he will not die on the spot.  
When the wave passes Nureyev knows he only has a couple of minutes before the second comes. He uses this time to press the alert that is also on the night-stand, which is attached to a bracelet on Vespa. 

One of the major risks of founding a new settlement is the kind of people that might be attracted when the borders are open to the general population. The problem of the public has plagued every category of founders, from utopian-anarchists to capitalist oligarchies: short of imposing total militia- enforced isolationism, there is just no way to screen each person that puts down roots in your new berg. Settlements out in the far reaches of the Outer-Rim, Kuiper Belt moons, planets and asteroids always run the risk of welcoming a wave of exiles, criminals and otherwise undesirable elements.  
Brahma is still thought of as the place where the fear of a lawless planet became a terrible reality. Named for one of a pair of hypothetical trans-Neptunian objects in old-earth cosmological speculation, Brahma was to be a haven for capitalist-venture families to consolidate their various empires of war technology and luxury goods. From the inception of Brahma, its founding families lived in fear of the devastation that could be wrought by such an unknown public. Part of the reasoning in picking little Quaoar came from the belief that the planet’s obscurity would cause Brahma to be overlooked. The founding families did not want to share their new home with too many others. 

Vespa and the second attack arrive at around the same time. Knowing better than to try to move him, Vespa sits on the edge of his bed and works her hand into his so he can squeeze it and will know that she has not left him. With her other hand she picks up one of the ear-cuffs from the nightstand and puts it on Nureyev, and then combs her fingers through his hair until his breathing calms.  
A year ago, Nureyev could never have imagined he would let anyone see him so vulnerable. Let alone Vespa Ai, who looks like the punchline of a classist joke about Outer-Rimes with her green hair and her skull-shaped dialysis pouch and her willingness to throw down anywhere with anyone that pisses her off. The first thought Nureyev had upon meeting her on the Carte Blanche was that if he shook her hand, he was going to get tetanus. And then he got to know the real Vespa, and while the theory about tetanus has proven untrue, there is still plenty to be wary of. 

She has no interest in making herself pleasant to other people. If she does not like you, she will tell you and then remind you of it at regular intervals. She cusses and chews a nasty brand of synthetic dip when she is nervous, which is often because of the persistence of her auditory and visual hallucinations. The first job Nureyev ever did with her, a sort of ‘getting to know you’ heist just before Juno and Rita arrived, he watched her ram down a door because pushing didn’t work and she wasn’t going to waste her time “pleasuring the handle”.  
She is, in short, the closest thing Nureyev has ever seen to the mythical Trashsquatch that Brahmese children are warned of to keep them away from rubbish tips outside of working hours. She is also the best doctor Nureyev has ever had. 

With the ear-cuff in place, the pain ebbs. It does not go away. It is just been turned down. 

Nureyev sits up and wipes the sweat from his brow. He lets go of Vespa’s hand, seeing with a pang of guilt that he has scored marks into her palm. Again.

Vespa shakes her hand out as if getting rid of a cramp “Don’t worry about it. Can you walk?”

“For a bit.”

Guarded as Nureyev is with his personal information, it would be suicidal to leave the only medical practitioner aboard out of the loop in terms of his chronic condition. Besides Vespa could have figured it out on her own. Nureyev looks Brahmese and speaks a Brahmese dialect. He is over the age of thirty and has to take rest days because of a complaint of abdominal pain. He doesn’t drink and maintains a low-salt diet. Anybody with ten minutes of medical training and half a brain could figure out that Nureyev has Brahmese PKD. 

For two generations, the flagship megacity of Brahma expanded to meet the demands of the labourers who worked in the founders’ factories, the merchants who sold the founders’ products and the others who filled in the gaps with housing, food, medical care and entertainment. By the third generation the founders and the wealthy that had joined them decided they did not like being ‘confined’ to the acropolis of Brahma’s sprawl and built themselves the hovering city of New Kinshasa from which they could profit from the Brahmese workers without ever having to look at them. Still, they were unhappy with the number by which the population grew each year owing to immigration and births. Up in their towers, the founders decided it was time to combat the problem.  
Maybe thirty years before Nureyev was born, a few strains of disease were released to fracture the population and limit their capacity to organise against those above. Nothing as simple as, say, the bubonic plague or an influenza that might distract them for a few years at a time; this was a much more long-term solution. Genetic, degenerative conditions that were wiped out with gene-therapies long before the first Martian dome was planted. These diseases were thought to be extinct. Perhaps they were until founder-money discovered the right lab. However New Kinshasa came into their little nest-egg of death, they were for once quick to share the wealth. The exact process of sowing the diseases into DNA that did not previously contain them is still a mystery and probably will remain as such long after Nureyev is dead. All he knows is that of the quartet of MND, Huntington’s, PKD and Fibromyalgia, Nureyev ended up with PKD. Polycystic Kidney Disorder. 

When the diseases were judged not to be enough either, the Angel Programme came and so Nureyev belonged to the second generation to grow up under its watchful eye and wrathful hand.

One of the only clear memories he has managed to salvage from the trauma amnesia that blanks out everything before he the age of eight is a memory of the Angel in action. He must be young, going by how close he is to the trash and cigarette-butt carpet, but he is not at all alarmed by the bright light and the whine and the silhouette of a screaming man caught in mid-stride. Peter already knows that the Angel only hits what it means to hit. One of the few restrictions on its power is the killing of minors, so barring a truly heinous crime Nureyev is safe until he turns 17. 

He remembers shielding his eyes. He remembers a woman across the street with a basket of wires meeting his eyes, cupping a hand to her mouth and saying “Let that be a lesson, little man! That’s what you get for pissing on the curb!”

Brahmese humour. Always on point, always ironic. In a world like New Kinshasa’s, it was either laugh about it or spend all of your inevitably short life sobbing as your body was poisoned. 

In the medbay, Vespa helps him to lay on the examination bed. She turns on one of the multi-tool machines and the ultrasound probe, so that it is warming up while she digs his file out of the small compendium of crew medical information. Hers and Buddy’s take up the lion’s share, but Nureyev is closing in on them fast. A part of him is proud to be out-pacing a pair of radiation-sick Outer-Rimes in their fifties all on his own. 

“Ok, I’m thinking we’re gonna have to do an examination. Do you want a spinal block before I do that?”

“Yes.”

There was a time when Nureyev hated needles so much he had to drink a little bit before getting his annual vaccinations. Now it doesn’t bother him to be jabbed in the base of the spine with a needle the size of his forearm. As long as it works.  
Vespa leans against the tools counter and glances over Nureyev’s medical information while the injection sets in. She has him respond to her repetition of information so she knows he is still awake and thinking- sometimes the painkillers just knock him for a fucking loop so that Nureyev doesn’t know who the hell he’s looking at or even what language he is speaking. 

“Adult onset, chronological-trigger. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“At what age?”

“Thirty.”

“How many invasive surgeries?”

Takes him a moment to remember. He has had so many at this point it is hard to know. “We may have to count the scars. Thirteen, I think.”

“Twelve, Peter. You’re counting the new kidney.”

“Ah, right.”

To this date it is not yet known if any Brahmese with PKD has survived to die of old age. Hard to judge, as the average Brahmese does not tend to survive to old age, and the kind of infrastructure needed to take census do not exist in an official capacity. Everything is organised at a community and grass-roots level and the New Kinshasa above don’t want to acknowledge the traditional systems of government that work without them, so there is no communication whatsoever. Those who get sick stay sick for maybe two or three years more, then die. Nureyev is already pushing it at thirty-eight and intends to see how much further he can push that by replacing his affected organs. Eight months ago, he replaced one kidney. If things go according to plan with his budget and the work stays steady, he will have enough to replace the second kidney in six months more. And then there is the matter of replacing the stuff that has metastasized- which PKD cysts didn’t used to do. That is, of course, assuming this Cure-mother prime thing doesn’t pan out.

From the angle and intensity of the pain, Nureyev suspects another cyst has just cropped up on a piece of flesh that is not used to it. 

“You don’t think it’s coming from the new kidney? As far as organ transplants go, eight months is still pretty new.”

“What, the pain? No. I haven’t felt a thing from that spot ever since.” 

“How far along does that spinal block feel?”

Nureyev shrugs “I can’t feel much.”

“Ok, I’m gonna start massaging your abdomen. Let me know if it’s too painful.”

He cocks an eyebrow “Massaging?”

Vespa flaps her hands uselessly “You know what I mean. I’m just gonna poke around in there and see how much I can feel. Why do we always have to do this, Peter? Why do you always look at me like I’m about to start punching you in the gut? Now roll that nice cashmere up so I can do my job.”

“This is nylon, Vespa, no one sleeps in cashmere.”

The new kidney was a surgery that left no scars. He swallowed a pill then laid down for a couple of hours while the kidney slowly, painlessly dissolved the organic one and took its place. It felt like drinking a huge bottle of carbonated soda and then getting on a trampoline for a few hours. Not pleasant, not unpleasant, but Nureyev was definitely aware there was something happening in there. Juno kept putting his ear against Nureyev’s stomach to “check if it’s working”. It did. His pain was decreased, for a little while, and going by his blood tests, his filtration systems were working well again. But one metal kidney functioning as a perfectly healthy organic one is not enough to beat back the disease entirely, the since the cysts have spread to a few other things in his abdominal cavity, this is by no means the end.  
Vespa has judged it too risky to touch the other kidney until its replacement is at the ready. So, beyond a few lithotrophic sessions as the need arises, it gets to sit inside of Nureyev undisturbed, patiently shaving the years from his life with every day that passes.

“Yeah, there’s something new going on.” says Vespa after a moment of kneading at him. She moves to roll her sleeves up, realises she hasn’t got her lab coat on, and passes this off by pretending to scratch at her arm.

“How bad?”

“Significant, Peter. That’s what I’m gonna call it until I can get a look at it. Imaging is warmed up, now. You ready?”

“Sure. Fuck me up.”

Vespa rolls her eyes “Those painkillers are almost too good, huh?”

The cold probe touches his abdomen. The screen grows grainy and dark as a picture of Nureyev’s insides is built, the signals struggling past the small disturbance which his prosthetic kidney emits so it cannot be scanned and have its design copied. As the image grows clearer, Vespa swears. 

With the languid ease of a drunk, Nureyev glances at the screen, scanning the lunarscape snapshot of himself “Oh, he is a big one isn’t he?”

“Right on your liver too. Shit. Ok. Yeah, he’s got some friends.”

They grow quiet. Vespa mouths numbers in her first language as she counts the new cysts, leaving the probe to hover over her patient so she can scribble them into his file. Nureyev is too tired and too drug-drunk to count properly. He knows there are a lot of new ones. He knows that if not for the spinal block he would be feeling pain in a lot of other places by now. The cysts seem to grow before his eyes. 

When Nureyev speaks again, the energy has gone out of his voice. He has no wit to cut this thing down to size, to make his disease smaller than himself and therefore manageable.  
“It’s as though it knows.”

Vespa nods “I didn’t want to say it and sound, well, paranoid, which clinically I am, but y’know…but, I swear, ever since you got the cybernetic one put in, the cysts have been moving a lot faster. Like your body knows it’s got a limited time left to, uh…”

“Kill me.” supplies Nureyev.

“Yeah, that.” Vespa grabs a felt-tip pen and starts marking Nureyev’s skin with x’s over the worst offenders, using the screen for reference “It wouldn’t surprise me. This Kinshasa shit is the nastiest piece of biological warfare that’s ever been engineered, and I’m including the shit that M’tendere Beza’s think-tank came up with. Those bugs, they just killed the combatants and support staff and maybe a few settlements too close to the drop-zones. Wiped ‘em out. The real success of bio warfare, I think, is when it sinks into the bones and moves down the branches of the family tree, like eye colour.”

“That should be part of the introduction for your article.”

“Ha! Yeah, sure, my next article, which I’ll publish right after I finish writing my memoires.”

Nureyev is confused “I thought you were writing an article. I assumed, anyway.”

She cocks a chipped eyebrow “Why the hell would you think that?”

“It’s a good opportunity, isn’t it? Few of us sick Brahmese ever have access to medical care that observes us so steadily. My case study would be the first of its kind. I’ve seen you typing on your tablet with my notes in front of you, so assumed you were transcribing them. And anyway, you’ve invested so much of your time and effort into this, it stands to reason that you should reap some benefit-”

“The benefit is,” a calloused hand rakes through his hair fondly “That your assless ass doesn’t die. I like having you around, kid. You taught me to moisturise.”

“Don’t make me laugh, Vespa, it hurts.” 

“Oh, fuck off, you can’t feel anything from your pelvis to your collarbone. And what I was typing, Peter, was a spreadsheet of your cyst growth. I was trying to come up with a formula that’d predict where the next batch will crop up. It ain’t working, by the way. Your PKD doesn’t really behave like a disease so much as it does like a…I don’t know. An animal, maybe. Like it’s got intuition.”

Nureyev glances back at the screen “Let it try intuiting its way into metal organs. The liver is out as soon as this last kidney is gone.”

Vespa pulls a face that does actually make Nureyev laugh- his dark humor has come back to him, suddenly.

“Oh, don’t tell me I won’t make it that far, Vespa. How long do I have then? A year? Months? Days? Perhaps minutes?”

“You’re fine, Peter.”

“Tell me I at least have two more years?”

“You’ll get more than that if you settle down and let me finish this.” 

After she has marked about a dozen x’s across his abdominal cavity, Vespa turns on the one machine she had to order after Nureyev arrived. The one concession to his presence. The one thing that somebody who knows Nureyev, or rather, who knows how to look for him, could point to out of all the things on the Carte Blanche as evidence that the Brahmese with a hundred faces in around.  
Not that anybody comes and goes apart from the little Aurinko crime family. The Carte Blanche is completely off-limits. If any one of them need to meet some industry contact it happens off-board, with the CB tucked away in some shaded spot because Buddy doesn’t want it to be recognisable, yet will not concede to Jet’s suggestion that they get a visual cloaking device because “It will ruin the aesthetic”. 

Vespa works quickly and methodically. Her hands are deft, her movements are sure and because Nureyev can hardly even feel the therapyhead touching his skin. The first time he ever had this procedure done the doctors used an older style of machine which required that he lay down under a huge, bright lamp so that he had to shut his eyes against it, and was unable to watch what was happening to him. He just had to trust that the doctors would do their job and nothing else. For almost an hour he lay there in a petrified silence while strangers talked around him, discussing his body in medical jargon that made him feel like an object. They thought he didn’t understand their Rime-Arabic- apparently they knew enough to identify a Brahmese with PKD on sight, but not enough to know that Rime-Arabic was one of the major languages of the planet.  
He never went back and has made it a rule that he never seems the same doctor twice. Vespa is the one exception he has made in seven years of dealing with it. Vespa is also the only of his doctors whom he has ever talked to during the procedure.

“I always forget you have a scar shaped like a pretzel. I can’t see it until I get right up in here, like, you can’t feel it but my lips are almost on your abdomen-”

“You had no reason to make me aware of that.”

“- and then I start seeing this faint shape and I’m like, hey, I’d remember if Peter had a pretzel shaped scar, what is this? Is it a skintag? Has he got cancer? Do I have to diagnose this guy with cancer as well as shock his guts? And then I remember and it’s the kind of relief you get after a really good shi-”

“Change the subject!” he folds an arm over his eyes because the low-light has begun to make his head ache.

“Ok. Have you looked into that lead yet?”

“Not that subject.”

Vespa sighs. He feels her breath on his stomach “Come on, Pete. We should be looking into all our options.”

Irritation prickles at him. Nureyev is tired, in pain and very much not interested in rehashing this with Vespa “My options, Vespa. This is not your body.”

“Yeah, but I am your primary medical care provider.” her voice stays measured. Nureyev almost wishes she would get worked up so he could shout her down, so he could win “And…and it scares me. How quickly the cysts are metastasizing scares me. We could be working at this cure-mother prime thing for a long time, Pete. It’s already been over a year.”

“We’re getting closer, aren’t we?”

“Getting our ducks in a row, sure, but we still gotta- you know, the ducks ain’t even hatched. We don’t know what we’re getting in a row! Could be dragons.”

“Dragons aren’t real, Vespa.”

“They got ‘em on Earth. They live in the ruins of cities and eat breadcrumbs.”

“You’re thinking of pigeons.”

“Nope, I’m pretty sure I’m right. I wish you’d just let me look into it if you’re not interested. A half blueprint is better than not knowing anything about the security. Hey, breathe. You’re too tense down here…that’s good. Ok. Keep it calm.”

She moves to the other side of the bed and starts to work on a spot near to his hip.

“I wouldn’t call it a blueprint so much as a personnel list.”

“Better than nothing.” says Vespa.

Ever since Vespa was informed of his cybernetic kidney, she has been interested in the place it came from. Just as all medical professionals know about the Brahmese Quartet, they know of a mysterious, nameless organisation that supplies cybernetic organs which work so well that they often continue to perform after the host body is dead. They are prohibitively expensive and difficult to access- one must have two former clients sponsor them to be considered for surgery at all. 

To get his, Nureyev had to unearth an old, old alias, back from the early days of his solo career, and contact an old flame who was somehow still in love with that character. He hadn’t thought about them for at least ten years except in passing, and then when he mentioned to Jet that he needed to figure out some sponsors, Jet mentioned that Karelius Yu’s old paramour still used him as a subject in their paintings. This obliged Nureyev to check his notes to figure out who the hell Karelius Yu was supposed to have been (the bastard son of an oxygen baron who had been cast out of the family satellite-estate on the pretence of exploring, but really it was just because his face was too much like his mother’s extramarital partner’s) and then what the hell he’d told the guy to keep them obsessed with what he can judge as a pretty clumsy, if complex, character.

Luckily for Nureyev, he has kept detailed notes on all his time as all his aliases in case of situations exactly like this. Add to that Karelius Yu is incredibly embarrassing in retrospect and Jet never forgets anything which has the potential to embarrass Nureyev. He filled in the blanks in Nureyev’s notes.  
“You quoted extensively from the poetic canon of the Old-Earth West.”

“I read quoted them cowboy poetry and they still fell in love with me?”

“Not that West, the ancient, nebulous political-cultural-colonial entity. I am very interested to know what in the hell you mean when you say ‘cowboy poetry’.”

Karelius Yu pulled in one sponsor; all Nureyev had to do was bat his lashes and quote some Frost. The other sponsor Nureyev made up from scratch, commissioning a hacker to fake a medical history. That hacker was Rita and the ‘commission’ was letting her paint his nails. After that it moved quickly, and Nureyev got his organ, and Vespa got ahold of this bone that she’s been worrying at ever since.

“It’s a lot of people to take out, yeah,” she moves the therapyhead a few inches upwards “And I’d have to find a drug that wouldn’t alter their heart rates or any major metabolic systems…which, let’s face it, is impossible. I’d have to invent one. I could do that, if I had the resources and a couple of lab assistants with no morality.”

“Vespa, I would die before that could happen.”

Her voice is still patient. Kind, not professionally. Simply kind. “And we’d have to replace pretty much everything between the pelvis and the lungs. Lots of metal. You’d set off the metal detectors like Juno. Some people think it’s cute to match their partners. Juno with his bullets, you with your metal liver, stuck together in customs.”

“Fine, Vespa, if you want to continue entertaining this idiotic line of investigation then I will not stop your fun.”  
The problem is Vespa’s imagination. All good thieves need a solid imagination to deal with the disguise and breaking-in aspects of a heist, and to facilitate an escape if something goes wrong. However, people like Vespa who have reputations and a slightly defective survival instinct can tend to get a bit disconnected from the reality of the work. Just because Vespa wants to believe that she can find a way to supply Nureyev with the most advanced biological-substitute technology in the solar system does not mean that she actually can. 

The personnel to which they refer are actually the unnamed company’s shareholders, who protect their patents by being fitted with small monitoring devices that watch for bodily distress. Spikes in adrenaline that are consistent with, say, being stuck up at gun-point, or being forced to hand over information about the company’s designs and production model. It alerts every other shareholder when one of them has an event, and starts off a timer on a payload that is attached to the hidden labs where the technology is produced and stored. Unless that alert is dismissed by the system administrator, the whole thing goes up in smoke.  
It should be momentous that Nureyev has identified the entire board of the company. All six of the selfish, evil motherfuckers. Their names and faces and aliases and home addresses and spouses and bank accounts. But he doesn’t touch them. He doesn’t dare because he is afraid of what will happen next. When they catch him, will they refuse further treatment? And then what stands between him and a swift and more painful death than the one that he already slogs towards? Thinking about how close his salvation might be just makes the days like these worse and the gaps between them, spent in anticipation of his next bout when his mind should be on other things.

Knowing these identities is momentous. It is also absolutely useless to Nureyev. 

And so he lets a not-uncomfortable silence lapse between him and Vespa, stares at the inside of his elbow and tries not to think about how close to death he really is.  
It would have to be just after he and Juno found each other again, wouldn’t it?

But that’s Brahmese humour: on beat and ironic. 

Days like these never have a climax of pain, after which point the pain scales down. Usually Nureyev wakes up in pain and goes to sleep in pain, spending the day at the edge of consciousness or sleep, moving only to feed himself or take care of his hygiene. He does not waste spoons on being pleasant to people if they happen upon him shuffling to the bathroom. In the rare instances in the past six years where he has lived in close quarters with others, sometimes this has been cause for complaint. Why doesn’t Nureyev speak with them or mind his manners when he is engaged? Sure, he’s in pain, but is that an excuse for being snappish? Here on the Carte Blanche the crew realise that their hurt feelings are less important than Nureyev’s hurt organs. They get the hell out of his way and do not bother him unless he asks to be bothered. Nureyev can pull the blankets over his head and doze through the fog of post-anaesthetic let-down without worrying about the social consequences for tomorrow. His one concession to bad-pain-day quarantine is that someone gets to check if he wants to eat once it hits the evening hours.

This is what he assumes Rita is doing when he hears her knock. It is easy to tell it’s Rita before she announces herself- the knock is always very rapid and very low on the door.

Nureyev reluctantly exposes his face to the air “Enter.”

An uncharacteristically quiet Rita pads into the room, clutching a tablet. Silhouetted against the soft hallway lights she looks like an angel of death in footie pyjamas, coming to relieve Nureyev of his earthly sufferings. 

Rita doesn’t bother to turn the lights on “Hey. How you feelin’?”

“Ill.”

“Don’t wanna eat nothin’?”

“Not today, no.”

“Mind if I, uh, get in there with ya for a second?”

The request strikes Nureyev as so weird he cannot say no. He shifts over and lets Rita climb up onto the other side, in the dark, and prop the tablet up against her knees. She has paused this morning’s news stream on what looks like a still of the Hyperion City town hall- Nureyev recognises the graffiti tags on the faux-Grecian pillars. A handful of people stand about a podium at the top of the stairs. One of them is the broad-shouldered, grim-faced agent who handled him during his brief stint as a Dark Matters dogsbody. Sasha Wire. One third of Juno’s childhood ‘gang’. The other one Nureyev has never seen before. Hyperioners don’t tend to carry about photos of their loved ones. Too sentimental, too easy to lose.  
But from Rita’s silence and the familiarity obvious between the man and Sasha, Nureyev can make an educated guess.

“Is that Mick Mercury?”

“Yeah.” she sounds defeated in a way Nureyev hasn’t often heard before.

“Why is he at city hall?”

By way of response, Rita plays him the stream.

Mick’s voice is tinny and confident in front the flashes of Kanegawa CameramenTM and the clamour of an unseen crowd of reporters and public alike. He has the expression of a man who has discovered he is the sole heir of a massive fortune and stepped in a bear-trap in the same instant.  
“…love this city because I can’t help but love it! We can’t help but love our family, even if sometimes they get dirty and corrupted and their sewers are full of, uh, mutated rabbits and their trains are never on time! And they promised to seal up that sinkhole in front of the ER but the funds keep going ‘missing’, but you know what? When family goes a little off the rails you don’t abandon family. You check them into rehab. You get them to therapy. And that, citizens and friends, is my mayor’s promise to you. Together, we’re going to get Hyperion City checked into the rehab programme she is so long over-due to start!”

“Mayor.” repeats Nureyev.

Rita nods “Mayor.”

As Mick continues belabouring the therapy metaphor, Sasha Wire expression is a combination of profound pride and strike-me-dead embarrassment. Personally, Peter thinks it is an appropriate speech. If there’s one thing Hyperion has had its fill of it’s purple promises by faded con men.  
Perhaps Mick Mercury is honest and earnest in his desire to rebuild his city, but he has absolutely no business even being near the highest elected office within the city. The last time Peter heard about Mick’s career Juno was mentioning something about a mechanics class. There is no way that Juno had any inkling that Mick was involved in something as major as a mayoral election, because if he did, you can be assured Juno would have abducted Mick and locked him in the Carte Blanche’s garage-basement until the election was over. 

“He chewed me up,” was the only thing Juno ever told him about the O’Flaherty business “He didn’t think he was doing it. The entire time he had his teeth in me he was telling me it was for my own good and the greater good, and I believed him, because I needed so badly to believe that I was good for something even if that was just as cud in somebody’s mouth.”

And that is Juno Steel, with decades of experience in manipulation and emotional abuses. From what he has heard of Mick Mercury, most of his misfortunes have been inflicted by his setting, circumstances and addictions. Otherwise the universe has been relatively kind to him- a family that loved him while they were alive, a community that knew and forgave him his faults. The more Peter considers what little he knows about Mick, the more he realises what a useful narrative Mick brings to the table.  
A true man of the people, because he is one of the people. The realisation of that bootstrap myths the rich of Hyperion recite every time someone talks about wealth redistribution. Mick’s utter lack of political training and experience? Well that just means that he isn’t corrupted by the system! He can attack it with fresh, unclouded eyes and see what can be saved and what must be destroyed.

And the more Peter thinks about the charming little populist figure that Mick has cut, the more he looks at Sasha Wire. 

Sasha Wire, beside one of her two childhood friends. Embarrassed by him and proud of him. Or, perhaps, embarrassed by herself and by what she is doing to him.

Indeed, when it is finally Sasha’s turn to talk she steps up to the podium as if the microphone is a snake. Her words come out thick and reluctant.  
“It has been an absolute pleasure to work with Mayor Mercury. As many of you New-town locals know, the mayor and I have been best friends since early childhood, so it’s something of a dream come true to be able to work so closely together, improving our city. Our relationship and understanding of the unique needs of Hyperion City will form the basis of Dark Matters’ sponsorship of this city and its continuing improvement.”

Well, that seals it for Nureyev “Ah. They’ve bought the office, then.”

Grim, Rita pauses the stream and nods “It looks legit, ‘cos everybody who knows Mistah Mercury knows that he’n Miss Sasha have been best buds since they were in single digits so it ain’t that weird that a friend who knows her way around politickin’ and policy like a Dark Matters goon would step in. It’s just legit-lookin’ enough that nobody’s gonna say anythin’ ‘cos the provisional government was full ‘a Kanagawa shills an’ CEO’s an’ all them types ‘a parasites.”

She pauses, both for breath and to steel herself for what she is about to say next. Again, uncharacteristic for Rita to think before she speaks. 

“You wanna know somethin’ funny?”

What Nureyev really wants is to sleep, but since neither Juno nor Jet are here, he supposes he should fill the role of Rita’s confidant. It is the least he can do for the woman who bullied Juno’s stubborn, self-destructive ass through fifteen years of semi-functional alcoholism “Certainly.”

“Well it ain’t funny, funny. It’s just- it’s this. I ain’t from Hyperion. I ain’t from Mars or any ‘a the other planets you’re thinkin’ of right now. I ain’t from a moon or an asteroid. I’m what’cha call on OG.”

Nureyev blinks “An Earthling.”

Rita’s smile is bitter “Ya wouldn’t think it at my size an’ all, but I am. Straight outta the heart ‘a Turtle Island. Mama’s a Oneida lady from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an’ my dad’s from another continent. Some ‘a us just turn out real short. Like, old-Earthling short short. How much d’ya know about Earth?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. I’ve been there once. I was young and was distracted from the, ah, bigger picture of the inner-workings of Earth because it was my first time seeing snow that wasn’t grey from pollution.”

“I got me an Earthling pedigree. None of my family ever left Earth before me. Not a one.”

“Why are you telling me this, Rita?” asks Nureyev. On any other day he might be content to listen in silence, but his sickness has worn his patience thin. He wants to sleep. 

“The point is I ain’t from Mars. Ain’t it funny how upset I am? ‘Bout the elections. Ya can’t even vote in ‘em if ya weren’t born in Hyperion, and I wasn’t. But I feel so sick. I feel like this is the end ‘a somethin’ that maybe wasn’t good but it wasn’t that bad, an’ now somethin’ that’s just bad is comin’ in. Poor Mick Mercury’ standing right in front’a it and he don’t even know what he’s doing, lettin’ the bad thing in. It’s funny ‘cos I could just pick up an’ go home where we don’t deal with this kind’a corruption much no more. I could put my head down an’ go home an’ there’d be a whole life waitin’ for me ta pick it up where I left it.” 

“But Mars is home.” surmises Nureyev “Rita, you know you don’t have to be from a place to love a place.”

“I know. It’s drivin’ me fuckin’ nuts. I wish I didn’t give a hoot about what happens to Hyperion, but I do. An’ this ain’t right. An’ it ain’t right that I climbed up in here ta dump all’a this on ya, but…”

“But home is far away at the moment, I know.” Nureyev closes a hand over hers “Both of them.”

“They never used ta be separate in my head,” Rita sinks deeper into her pillow “Mistah Steel an’ Hyperion City. They were both types ‘a home an’ it was easy ta think they’d never need ta get separated ‘cos Mistah Steel never left Hyperion, ya know? Until you came.”

“And stole him away?”

“Naw, reminded him that the world ain’t just gotta be the bottom of a whiskey glass an’ doin’ a job that he ain’t kinda ta him. I’d been tryin’ ta for years. I gave him a lotta my life an’ I’m glad I did…it’s just makin’ me mad right now, that I gotta be here thinkin’ about Mars on my own while he’s worryin’ about other things. It’s selfish. But it’s the way I feel on the inside.”

At that, Nureyev has to laugh “I understand that, Rita. If there’s one thing we can’t help about the human condition, it’s how we feel on the inside.”

Rita leaves when Peter is out again. God, can that man sleep. Rita’s never met a person who can actually fall asleep in mid-sentence. She is also pleased that Peter apparently feels comfortable enough with her to relax enough that he falls asleep. It may be that he was too tired to keep his eyes open, but at least he didn’t ask her to leave before then. He was content to let her mutter about the political situation on Hyperion and the implications of Dark Matters’ overt involvement with placing Mick Mercury in power, and Mick Mercury of all people, really? Great guy, don’t get me wrong, but he ain’t no big brain an’ the last time Mistah Steel said anythin’ about career it sounded like he was teaching at the old high school, so how the heck did he get himself in the runnin’, let alone get all them votes?

Then Peter was unconscious.

Rita gently removes his head from her shoulder and pads out into the hallways, which are dimmed to mimic the early dusk. Buddy is in charge of the lighting and atmospheric controls, keeping them on a classic 24-hour day, the ambient light copying a cloudless day of some temperate Earth biome. Again, it strikes Rita how funny it is, the amount that Spacers thoughtlessly borrow and copy from Earth when it is only known to most of them as a distant land of origin. The first cradle of the first civilizations, holding little contemporary value.  
It was probably politeness on Peter’s end that he listened at all. Spacers aren’t anymore interested in hearing about Earth than they would be in hearing about somebody’s grandaddy’s retirement home, unless they’re a terranthropoligst. But Rita likes that Peter is polite. The more she sees of him, the more she likes him. 

When you love somebody who hasn’t been treated right by past partners, it is only natural to be suspicious of a new suitor. Rita watched Peter carefully the first few weeks. There was some tension there, between him and her lady, the tension of ex-lovers, of people who had hurt each other profoundly and didn’t know how to talk about it without deepening the wounds. After the Zolatovna mission, that tension changed. It was a lovers’ tension again; people who are getting to know each other after an absence. Rita still watched Peter, waiting for the signs of abuse to start creeping in. Waiting for Juno to start wearing long sleeves and sunglasses indoors again. Waiting for him to hit the bottle hard and ask Rita, in the worst moments of his drunken despair, just what it was that made him impossible to love.

Instead Juno started to quit drinking, wore more sleeveless shirts and summer dresses and called himself “a goddamned prize” one morning when he was putting his eyeliner on. Rita relaxed. Peter relaxed too, sensing that the tiny predator on his trail had decided he should be allowed to live. 

Something about Peter was teaching Juno to love himself in a way he hadn’t been allowed to before. What could Rita do except thank Peter and love him for that?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, there's Mick and Sasha! They look like they're having fun!  
> So this was supposed to be a bit longer. I was hoping to get us to where the promised 'furby nightmare' bursts onto the scene and captures Vespa's heart, but honestly it just dragged on too long and after that seventeen page monster the last chapter ended up as, I think it's probably better for the story's pacing if we get that a bit later. So instead we're checking in on Nureyev and the CB. 
> 
> Anyway, I wonder how Juno's doing right now?


	6. How I met your boyfriend

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: implication of drug use/ criminal career by a minor, mentions of chronic illness with a pain, condition, aftermath of dissociative episode in a safe situation, non-sexual nudity, mention of gunshot wound to the face, mentions of grieving traditions specific to Judaism, canonically psychotic character experiencing visual hallucinations. 
> 
> Suggested listening: 13 angels standing guard around your bed by Mt Silver Zion

(Eighteen and a half years ago, Trojan-Solar Border Station 6)

The reason that Jet has never called Peter Ransom by the name he is currently using is because Jet has known him by so many different names that it just gets irritating. Peter, in his mind, has always been ‘the thief’ or, when they started to run into each other with enough frequency that Jet had to call him something, hence ‘Pakak’. The thief happily responded to this moniker for years before it occurred to him to look into an Inupiat language dictionary and research what the hell it meant. It was within the first six weeks of Jet’s painful detox so he was not happy to be woken up by a call from an unknown number at three in the morning. He did, however, take the evil, vindictive pleasure of a kid whose prank has finally been sprung when the thief nearly burst his ear drum.

“I cannot believe I have been responding to that name for fifteen years! You gain my trust and this is how you use it! A dog’s name!”

“Is it not accurate?”

“That is not the point-”

“Is ‘one who gets into everything’ not accurate to both your character and job description? If anything, it’s a compliment. Besides, I have very fond memories of that particular dog.”

“Where are you? I need an address for a letter bomb.”

But by that point the thief was laughing, and it made Jet laugh for the first time since he’d started the detox.

It is not commonly known that the Unnatural Disaster had not necessarily been a lone wolf before he was clasped to Buddy Aurinko’s generous bosom. There were others before her.  
People came and went as they needed him for business or bragging rights. It was a powerful thing to be able to point out the Unnatural and claim his friendship. Those who survived encounters with the Unnatural Disaster without life-threatening injuries or PTSD celebrated this achievement by vowing never to go near him again. If they dealt with him, it would happen remotely. If a contact asked to be put in touch with him, they would do so after a thorough warning of exactly how dangerous the man was. Part of the attraction of trading with Jet’s smuggling operation was the idea of interacting with Unnatural and getting out unscathed, though was a lot easier than the public had been led to believe. Jet’s relationships were transactional, which was fine. Well, perhaps not fine, but manageable, survivable, and entirely Jet’s fault for picking this career and the way that he chose to operate. 

And then came Pakak. He discovered Jet like a thorn discovering the inch of skin between socks and a pants-sleeve. Jet stopped trying to dislodge him a long time ago. Why Pakak, whose whole deal is that he had no friendships nor relationships that continued between his aliases, chose to imprint upon Jet of all people is a mystery. His success and survival are dependent upon this fiercely protected anonymity. Right up until he fell face-first in love with a certain hardboiled Martian detective, Jet was the only exception to that rule. Jet’s comms number was the only one that travelled among all the burners and professionals and personals that Pakak has ever used. He has never explained why. He rarely acknowledges it either.  
Personally, Jet suspects that Pakak has been able to maintain their relationship for so long exactly because he does not acknowledge it; acknowledging this significant hindrance to his anonymity would probably lead him to examine his life choices. If there’s one thing Pakak hates to do, it is think critically about his life choices when he could just compartmentalise instead. 

The first time the thief, Pakak or Peter, ever laid eyes on Jet, the latter was relatively new in his career. Two years ago Jet Sikuliaq had suddenly put himself on the map with his unexpected double-heist of a priceless jewel and a vehicle whose AI was said to be almost sentient, it was so high-tech. All by robbing M’tendere Beza, no less, who had already been identified as the engineer who would probably help to end the war. His face was not well known. His brand of crime, however, was by design impossible to ignore. Maybe he didn’t kill very many people after he tossed that prototype out of the Ruby and vaporised fifteen people, but he did cause a lot of collateral damage. Fires and explosions and ransacking the scene of the crime where an in-and-out job would have been easier.  
Not much was known about Jet except that he could cut a hell of a swathe of destruction in his wake when he wanted to. Again, by design. Jet did not want to be known. He just wanted to be feared.

“Good God, Unnatural, you’re very young.” is the first thing the thief says to him.

Trust him, Pakak, to pick up on what others don’t. He knows better than most what a mask looks like, and therefore, how to look past it. 

“What?”

“I said, you’re very young.”

“Who the hell are you and why are you talking to me?”

Eighteen years ago, on the little waystation of Odysseus: marking the border for intra-solar immigration in the Trojan Asteroid cluster, host of both the legitimate and criminal. It has gotten very hard to distinguish between the two. Ever since the solar POW camp opened up over on Patroclus, border control has been convinced that they are under siege by escaping prisoners or by Outer-Rim rebels coming to break them out. This paranoia regularly paralyses the whole station for two or three hours, unleashing packs of border control agents to interrogate every customer and run their papers as much as four times. Half an hour ago, something tipped the palpable anxiety in the air over into down-right suspicion and now Jet, along with several hundred other people, have to sit and wait while the agents find someone to blame for their fear.  
Jet, visibly and unmistakably an Earthling, is not worried about being detained. Those that tend to be picked on and up by border control are those who are closer to the profile of an OR, with the accents and the clothes and the gestures. Profiling is, of course, bullshit and pre-emptive detention has never worked in any way, but it benefits Jet and for the moment he will just take that. He is tired. He is thinking about his next fix, although he needn’t worry about coming down anytime soon. Just the thought that he might be trapped in the waystation for a little while makes him nervous. 

He isn’t in the mood to talk. Much less with this stranger who has just sat down at his table without an invitation, with a confidence that people don’t express unless they expect to have the upper-hand on the person they’re joining. 

“Who am I?” repeats the man “Who do you suppose I am?”

The Spacer version of ‘tall’, maybe six foot four. Heels, glasses that are probably not prescription, hair so black it seems to suck in light and makes Jet self-conscious about the early grey dominating his own hair. Pretty, Jet would guess, to somebody that experiences attraction.  
“Someone used to fucking around and being indulged. I don’t recognise you and I don’t care to. Go bother someone else.”

“You certainly don’t mince your words, do you?”

Sensing that he won’t be shaken off so easily, Jet sighs and marks the page of his book. Not that he was actually absorbing any of the words- he is too het up at the thought of being stuck on Odysseus for hours more.  
“Do you have a death wish? You are not only aware of who I am, but you announce it to the whole station?”

The man looks about them and the empty tables “I’m sure our audience has been hanging onto every word, Mr Unnatural.”

“This is a facility on a solar border. It’s bugged to hell.”

“Not over here. That’s why you picked this corner, isn’t it? The blind spot.”

Whoever this is, he clearly knows his craft. 

“What are you reading?”

Jet turns the book about so the man can read its title.

“This is by that woman who used to run the smuggling operation through Space Hell, isn’t it? Are you much interested in that subject?”

“What, Space Hell? No.”

“Really?”

Jet doesn’t like the mixture of smug understanding and interest on the man’s face “Firstly, I do not believe there is such a place as ‘hell’ where eternal punishment is meted out to the deserving. Secondly, smuggling is hard enough without using short-cuts through an alternate dimension, especially a short-cut where every other piece of news about it describes someone being deposited on the surface of the sun because they over-shot.”

“I don’t know. Whether or not I believe in hell varies depending on my mood, but I’ve always enjoyed the school of thought that takes the name seriously. An actual hell tucked away in the folds of a wormhole. Even if you aren’t religious or if a hell doesn’t fit your teachings, there’s some justice to the idea.”

“If it was an actual hell, I don’t think it would be so easy to move in and out.” says Jet, hating that he has been baited into conversation like this. “And if there is any justice, then the sort of people who use Space Hell as a shortcut should not be able to leave it.”

The man opens the book to its back page and looks at the author’s photo “Did you hear that she died?”

“Four years ago.” 

The man looks up at Jet over the rim of his glasses, which Jet suspects are decorative “Before your time.”

“Not that long before.”

“Her death created a vacuum in smuggler runs. I hear you picked up quite a few of them after the heist of the Iris.” The man shuts the book “I’m quite jealous, by the way, of the prize you picked up.”

“The Ruby? Don’t be. It handles like a draft horse.”

“Is it true she can talk?”

“The same way a household AI can talk. It whistles, though. I wouldn’t recommend stealing it, if that’s what you’re thinking. I won’t stop you if you try.”

“I know better than that,” the man smiles and slides the book back to him “Not only did I hear what happened to the last fool who tried, I saw the aftermath. I’ve never seen such a fantastic crash in a parking lot. Aurinko’s staff had a hell of a time scraping that warlord off the pavement, and they didn’t even find their head until after the close. Aurinko’s wife took out the trash and found a severed head inside the dumpster. A closed dumpster. Your car has a sense of humour, Mr Unnatural.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Mr Disaster, then?”

“Just Jet.”

The man smiles again. He has great teeth, each one of them pointed as dramatically as a canine, and his canines look like they were actually supplied by a dog. What is that, cosmetic? Natural? Mutation from whatever his planet puts in the public water? “I’ve never heard that name before.”

“You’ve never been to Earth, then. It’s as common as dirt.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means it’s short for Jetffrey.”

The man is taken off-guard by this and moves to smother a laugh against his hand. Only now does Jet notice that this ridiculous fucker is wearing gloves- gloves to go with a collared shirt and slacks. Jet can’t figure out if this is the best or stupidest fashion choice he has ever seen. Bold, if nothing else.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to disparage Earthling names-”

“Disparage away. It’s a stupid name.” 

The man recovers himself “I’m Cat Rorschach. Pleasure to- what, too obvious?”

Jet has pulled a face “Yes. Has anyone ever believed that’s actually your name?”

“It has worked so far, yes. What about it strains your credulity?”

“All of it. I see what effect you want. A balance of normal and the accidental cruelty of parents who think they are original, but ‘Cat Rorschach’ is far too uncanny.”

“Do you think it would work on a less disillusioned person?”

Jet frowns “What makes you think I’m disillusioned?”

“Well, apart from the aggressive hallmarks of your style of robbery…I don’t know, aren’t young people disillusioned?”

In hindsight, it is hilarious that Pakak chose this particular ‘old and wise’ tact to approach Jet, almost as if he were going to offer mentorship to a promising but misguided young power-house, because during this conversation they were the same damned age. A pair of freshly-minted twenty year olds, aged by their career choices and various substance habits, yet grudgingly aware of an inexperience owed to being around for only two decades.  
Evidently, Pakak thought the way to assert himself was by opening with the fact that he knew Jet’s real age, which few people did and even less believed.  
It was quite disconcerting, after all, to think that a seventeen-year-old had pulled off a heist that his superiors had dreamed of for longer than his entire lifespan. A child from a bumpkin planet that still blamed life’s myriad of miseries on magic had equalled the rank of the greatest names in crime! The years of careful crafting that went into La Charladora’s networks, the charisma and strategy that allowed Rauho Noorssen to consolidate the organ black-markets of the world, the vicious competition and racketeering that allowed the Devereauxes’ weapon plants to operate on a scale that rivalled the solar army. Apparently, all that hard work can be equalled and surpassed by a kid with a personality disorder and a weapon fresh from the ovens of hell. 

So that particular aspect of Jet’s origin remains un-investigated. It is gentler on everyone’s ego to say that Jet is a man of mystery who is too dangerous to solve.

“So, Mr Rorschach, where are you going?”

“Here and there.” the man must think there is a charm in being so aloof. Jet wonders if the man might be trying to seduce him, or if this is just how he sounds “I don’t stay in one place for very long.”

“Great. Cute.” Jet slides the book back into his bag, then double-checks to make sure he hasn’t crushed the merchandise inside.

“What have you got in there?”

“Martian shit.”

The man’s eyes brighten behind his glasses “May I see?”

“Uh, cameras.”

“Blind spot! Don’t worry, I don’t intend to snatch it and run. There’s hardly a place for me to hide from your wroth on an asteroid this tiny.”

“You’re skinny enough to get up in the vents.”

The thief raises his hands in surrender “Alright, say no more. If I may guess…” he falls silent.

At last one of the guards has grown suspicious of these two off by themselves. One, an Earthling, the second, Outer-Rime of some description, and its always worth investigating why people of either extraction are crossing solar borders. Earthlings could be eco-terrorists or spies against the industrial-military complex that funds installations like this border station. Outer-Rimes are automatic objects of suspicion as well, given what the solar governments are doing to them at the moment. Who wouldn’t want to attempt a revenge?

Black boots tromp across the scuffed floors. Jet imagines that boot in his back, then imagines grabbing the ankle just above it, giving her a good over-the-head spin and tossing her wide. It is the second thought that allows him to, if not smile, then come very close to it and appear as if he has nothing to hide, as he reaches past the bag which contains a fragment of Martian skull, and extracts his passport and visas. 

Silent, the guard holds out a hand and accepts Jet’s papers. Satisfied with the photo’s likeness to him, she examines the visa, glancing at the thief as she does.

“Travelling together?”

Jet shakes his head before the thief can start bullshitting “No, sir.”

The border guard looks at him with keener eyes. This may be because she has never seen an Earthling and is checking to see whether that rumour about all of them having sideways pupils is true, or because she is one arrest away from her quota and is debating whether or not to fill it with him. She gives the thief the same searching look, with decidedly less interest or suspicion.

“What’s the nature of your relationship, then?”

“Just friends,” says the thief “Running into each other unexpectedly.”

“Where are you from?” she asks of Jet “Which port did you leave Earth from, the last time you were there?”

Ah, so she thinks he is an ecoterrorist- one of the handful that leave via the port of Ningbo and spy on the next industrialists planning to supplant Earth’s low-impact agricultural practices. If Jet were a better human being then he certainly would be. But as of yet he has not done any work of that nature. Maybe he will, if the price is right, or if a threat to Utqiagvik coincides with one his rare attacks of conscience.

“San Juan. Three years ago.” he says, which is reflected in his passport. One of his two hobbies: embroidery and faking travel documents. 

The guard looks back to the thief “And you?”

“Oh, I’ve never set foot on Earth. Too many monsters, I hear. My last port of call was New Sugarloaf, Pluto.”

“Alright, well.” she passes Jet’s identification back “Travel safely, gentlemen, and remember to be vigilant. There are a lot of criminal types using the same routes as the ordinary people.”

The thief resists what must be the powerful urge to quip at her, hiding the snark behind a mild, innocent smile. Jet watches her approach another uniform and mumble something, which causes them to look over at their table. Then away, quickly, embarrassed that the Earthling caught them staring. 

Always nice to be made to feel like an exhibit at a zoo.

“Where are you going? Really.” asks the thief.

“Why? Think you can hide from my wroth on a shuttle?”

“I wouldn’t dream of stealing from you. I like having my fingers and hands where they are, thank you.”

Jet snorts. Popular legend, that: he’s supposed to have a collection of severed hands somewhere in his mythic base of operations, taken from all the thieves and double-crossers that ever tried to pull one over on him.  
“Just a Martian satellite. The Kanangawas’ private satellite.”

“Ah. Well, be careful of the kids if they happen to be around. The boy is a bit of a sadist. You wouldn’t think that a five-year-old would present a serious risk to an adult’s safety, but believe you me, he does.”

There is a bit of movement on the other side of the lobby. Bags are picked up from the ground, jackets are tied around waists, the occasional child is wrangled. Finally, things are moving again. A bored gate-agent announces over a tinny speaker that the shuttle to Puck is boarding.

The thief stands. “My cue. Been a pleasure, Jet. I do hope we meet again under less stressful circumstances.”

Well, he’s been diplomatic so far. No reason to change tacts now. Opening his book again, Jet nods “And I hope that your future aliases are more believable.” 

Privately, he thinks that will be the last time he ever lays eyes on that peculiar man. And this is what moves him to be generous.

“Mr Rorschach.”

The thief looks over his velvet shoulder.

“It’s skull.”

And so the last Jet sees of him is a genuine smile, a closed-mouth, shy smile that he must have developed in a stage of his life where he was shy about his teeth, and then he disappears into the thin crowd of kurtas and scarf-fringes and backpacks. Jet is almost sad to see him go. 

(Now. The Platonium, Elm Street, Number 4)

“Wait, wait, I’m confused. How has it never come up that you and Peter have known each other for fifteen years?”

“I thought it was obvious. We have many inside jokes.”

Juno chokes “You do not! Even if you did have a sense of humour there is no way you’d share it with Peter!”

“I am extremely funny, Juno. You are simply not in the position to appreciate it.”

“Now what the fuck does that mean?”

It was just past eleven o’clock in the morning when Juno stumbled home in a haze of shock, and perhaps fifteen minutes later when Jet pulled him out of the shower and made him start talking. The clock has just ticked past twelve-thirty. Jet has spent over an hour guiding Juno out of a deep dissociative episode with the story of his and Nureyev’s first encounter, and all of this while kneeling on the bathroom floor with a damp guy cradled against him. Juno cannot remember the last time he was held like this by someone who wasn’t also sleeping with him or wanting to. Maybe he never has been. When his wits are about him, Juno is not a tactile person. And now that he’s coming back to himself, still afraid but coherent, he finds he is too tired to care. What the hell does Jet care that Juno has been falling out of a towel in his lap for almost two hours? 

But Juno is just at the point where he is starting to care again. Never in his life has he felt so goddamned vulnerable- not during sex, not the time he had to get a colonoscopy, never. 

And yet it isn’t Jet by whom he feels watched. He feels eyes peering in from all over. Eyes that are not set into cameras, but set into the very walls, to the very structure of the satellite, and all trained on Juno while he hunkers on the floor of a bathroom.

“Can you help me stand up?”

Jet frowns “Are you hurt?”

“Nah, my legs are just asleep.”

“As are mine. We may have to roll.”

They eventually manage to get up with a lot of flailing and cussing. Juno wraps himself in a dry robe and goes to dress himself with shaking hands.

Every time he shuts his eyes, he sees what he saw in the basement all over again. It is burned into his eyelids with the same awful, stubborn clarity that Benzaiten’s body was for months afterwards. The last time Juno saw him.  
Everything about Benzaiten’s death was horrible: whether she meant to or not, Sarah’s shot caught him in the face. The police took the body and prevented Juno from addressing the proper funerary customs for a long time- so long that he couldn’t bear the thought of even being in the same room as the body that used to contain his brother, by the time he finally got it back. The Old Town chevra kadisha took over for him. Mick, goyim though he was, sat shiva with Juno for the whole week, feeding him and covering the mirrors and turning away mourners from all parts of Benzaiten’s life who’d come to pay their respects to the brother most of them had never met before. When the funeral came around and Juno couldn’t roll out of bed, Mick missed that too, sending Sasha to fill in for the both of them. On the day of his brother’s funeral, Juno laid in bed and stared at the ceiling without uttering a word. It was Mick who picked up the phone at the end of the day and heard the news that Sarah had found a way to hang herself in prison. 

It was Sasha who said the kaddish because Juno wouldn’t come to any service, even when they offered to form a minyan at someone’s house so Juno didn’t have to brave the synagogue. She did it for eight months and would have done it for the full year had Dark Matters not head-hunted her and slingshot her to the other end of the galaxy. For a long time, Juno felt that Sarah had killed them both. Benzaiten was the one that was shot and buried but he was not alone in his coffin.  
Juno was there, enclosed in the airless darkness, wrapped around his brother, leaving the same way they entered the world. 

But no one else seemed to understand. After Benten was gone and Sarah followed, the only person whom he thought of as family still remaining on Mars was Mick, and that should have made Juno determined to take care of their relationship. Instead, he made Mick an extension of the grieving process, of the horrible, grey days that followed Benten’s funeral. If he stayed away from Mick then he could stay away from those days. Mick didn’t leave Old-town without a reason, and without Juno, he wouldn’t have much reason. So Juno stopped returning his calls. One day, seven months after Benten was in the ground, Juno came home to find Mick sitting on the steps of his apartment. Waiting for Juno to get off of work. Juno turned right around and spent the next two days at Diamond’s place, not touching his comms once, and when he came home after those two days of quarantine it was with the empty sense of achievement that he’d driven Mick off for good. 

He was right, for almost twenty years. As long as Jet and Nureyev have had their friendship, which is a nice bit of karmic re-balancing. 

Jet has appeared in the doorway again “Juno, I do not want to cause you unnecessary worry-”

“Worry me.”

“The third time you failed to pick up your coms, I tried for Pakak instead. I couldn’t even get a dial tone on my regular com or the burner. I just tried both of your coms with similar results. I believe we have been cut off from the others.”

“Jesus shit. Ok. Uh, what do we do about that?”  
Shrugging, Jet tosses Juno’s second comms onto the rumpled bedsheets “I will open up my comms and see if I can’t figure out what is jamming us. We may have to search the property again. I checked over the flowers after you left and there were only two ordinary cameras more, so it may be that Kayrrine put a bug somewhere outside. If that does not work then we may have to…misappropriate another. Not ideal, of course, since we will have to destroy it afterwards.”

Juno shakes his head, collecting his damp twists into a bun at the base of his neck “We don’t need to take a risk like that. Look, Jet, if I tell you that I think we need to…just step this up a bit, will you listen to me?”

He sits down on the edge of the bed and gestures for Juno to continue. Juno catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror, grey-faced and shaken, dressed in clothes he would never pick for himself, and is so homesick it almost knocks him to his knees. He takes a deep breath.  
He looks back to Jet “I don’t think we’re gonna have the kind of time we thought we’d have. To investigate, I mean. I think we need to move faster than we’re moving. I think the info that Treelore Jiwe handed off was missing something…significant. It’s like…he saw a ship-wreck, and he told us all about the crew, the resource on board and who the survivors were, but he didn’t mention that the reason it crashed was because there was a Xenomorph on board and- don’t start, Jet, they’re not real and I will not have this argument again. Point is, we might need to bail out of this by tonight.”

Jet’s face is not an expressive one. His hands are where emotions show and can be read as clear as anybody else’s face, if you know Jet. His knuckles are white and his fingers are balled up against his palms. He has his doubts about what Juno’s proposing.

“It’s not just because I’m scared, Jet.” Juno pulls his eyepatch over his head, letting it sit about his neck for the moment “Remember, I’m a professional too. I know how to separate fear from my job. Do I want to be off this damn satellite? Yes. But I also want to be here so I can figure out what it is…who it is that reached into my brain and used a perfect projection of my baby brother to threaten me.”

“Do you think it was a threat?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t try to stop me from leaving. I think…that might have been what Kayrrine wanted. I think she wants me to reel and then she can step in with all the answers. Then, there’s a recruit right there. And a recruit’s husband can’t stay out of the organisation for long if he wants the marriage to last. She was testing our boundaries. Our relationship. Looking for weak spots, and she figured out Ishtar was the biggest. I guess I’m a better actor than I thought.”

Juno leans against the dresser. He feels like Jet looks- exhausted from days or weeks without solid sleep. 

“Right up until we got to the Wellness Centre, one of them was watching something on a baby monitor. Jiorjah. One of those super expensive ones Vespa keeps threatening to put in the medbay.”

Jet’s face darkens “Did you happen to see what they were watching?”

“No. Maybe they were looking at a server. Making sure it didn’t over-heat while it- it did what it did. A server, or a projector that can make its images go through walls.”

Jet’s hands squeeze together ever tighter, verging on bloodlessness “Juno…I am not sure if I should even acknowledge this, but if there is even the smallest of possibilities that your brother is-”

“No!” Juno snaps, then rubs his temples “Sorry. Sorry. He’s dead. I know he’s dead. Besides, if…if it really is or was him, then he not only discovered how to come back from the dead, but how to stop aging. He died when we were nineteen.”

“Ah. Twins?”

“Identical, yeah. Well…maybe identical. It was hard to tell whether we were identical or if we just looked a lot like each other…but that’s how I know, Jet, because maybe my age doesn’t show that much on my face, but you can tell I’m out of my teens. There’s no way that Benten could freeze his face- our face- at nineteen. That wasn’t my brother. This,” Juno gestures to his tattoo sleeve, then his own face “This is my brother. I know what he looks like because I look at him every day. I know the way his face moves because it’s the way my face moves. That was someone else pretending to be Benten. There was a sapient being beneath that.”

“I wonder, Juno, if these people haven’t somehow found a portal into Space-Hell.”

That makes Juno laugh “Sorry, Jet, I don’t believe in hell. Maybe alternate dimensions.”

Jet makes a dismissive gesture “Table that debate for another time. Perhaps they found a way to harness whatever it is that powers Space-Hell.”

“You think La Charladora would miss that? Her pet project is documenting all the little rips in space that lead to Space-Hell. I’m sure she investigates every new shady satellite that crops up to make sure it isn’t someone trying to, fucking, gentrify Space-Hell again. Jet, this is something new. This is something nobody else knows about- nobody else in our circle. Please. I’m not…I’m not just blowing steam, here. I’m sure this is something new.”

Jet sighs and scrapes a knuckle across his eyes “I trust you, Juno. If you say you are sure then I am sure. What I am having trouble with is what we are supposed to do about this.”

“I’m a detective, Jet. I detect.”

“And what am I, Watson?”

“No,” Juno snorts “You’re sassy, which means you’re tired. Take a goddamned nap and lose the attitude.”

“I do not have an attitude.”

“He said, with an attitude.”

Jet seems to relent a bit “Again, I am having trouble with the idea that I should just lay down after you give such a stirring call to action. We should start to plan our next moves.”

“I’ll plan our next moves. You plan your next REM cycle. I’ll wake you up in four hours, alright? After that I’ll have something we can use. A lead to chase, a plan of attack, whatever. I promise I won’t make a move without you signing off on anything.”

“That does not change that we are cut off from the others, Juno.”

Juno grins “Oh I know, Jet, but I think the time for pretending is over. I’m filing for a divorce. It was fun while it lasted. If the calvary want to come, we need to open the doors and let ‘em in. We’re in over our heads.”

“And you still insist on investigating?”

“Sure. A head start. We start with Julian. Julian may not be initiated, but I’m sure he knows something and we’re not about to go up against these people without any idea of what we’re gonna have to fight.”

Jet cocks an eyebrow “You believe he will help us?”

“He’d better.”

“I will agree to this if you will agree that we should at least try to get ahold of the others with his comms. Buddy keeps a number with no security around it so it appears to be an ordinary comms. Let me try that before they truly begin to panic.”

“Great!” Juno snaps his fingers “Now go to sleep. I’m gonna figure out where Julian works and what his hours are-”

Jet pulls a cream-coloured business card from his pocket and puts it under his nose.

“He’s the madame’s assistant, huh? Good for…wait. Did he…”

“Slip this to me while you were changing shirts? Yes.”

“Was he-”

“Making an advance? I don’t know. You know I’m not necessarily equipped to recognise that kind of intent.”

“The bastard!” Juno stuffs the card into his pocket “I’m gonna kill him! Ok, maybe it was just a way of introducing himself but- the bastard! Making a move on my fake husband!”

“It is fine, Juno.”

“Oh, it is? It is, is it? You’re sure you don’t want me to plant one of my kitten-heels up his ass?”

“You may be mis-interpreting the gesture.”

“But if I’m not-”

“Then it remains unimportant to our mission because our mission does not depend upon the integrity of our fake-marriage.”

Juno lets out a deep breath and feels himself deflate a bit “Fine. Just, hold me back if I forget the very reasonable things you just said. Good night.”

Even as he is laying down, Jet protests “Are you sure about this?”

Juno flicks the lights out “Sweet dreams for four hours minimum.”

He shuts the door with a lot more confidence and finality than he feels. 

(Now. Carte Blanche, Vespa and Buddy’s bedroom)

Vespa wakes up to a man in her bedroom. A tall man facing into the darkest of the corners, except for a pale slice of his forehead and one blank blind eye and-

No, wait. Wait, wait, wait.

Dial it back, Vespa. Blink, Vespa. Look again. 

Still there.

Ok, one more time and if it doesn’t work, get up and do something about it.

Blink, Vespa.

The man is gone. But Vespa is awake, now, and only a minute before the time she set her alarm-clock. Yesterday was rough and tiring. This morning, when she got up, she didn’t get up alone even though Buddy is a way earlier riser than her, and she had company in every room, even in the goddamned shower she had company, she had an old friend she buried years ago shuffling politely out of the way so Vespa could reach past them for the soap. And then there were some weird noises that were following her across the ship. Doesn’t bother her, normally, because noises follow her around because her brain makes the noises. But these are different. Not what she is used- not the voices she expects, the sound of people unseen, breathing, coughing, sneezing, the sound of her fellow crew-members speaking when their mouths haven’t actually opened.  
It persisted so much that Vespa decided she’d better just take a nap. Get ahead of it. And now she’s awake and, she waits, she gets up on her elbows and stares at herself in the reflection of Buddy’s vanity, and waits.

The noise comes after a minute. A dull thump from above her. The sound of something the size of a dog crawling through vents not much bigger than it. Vespa knows how big the vents are because something got up in there about two months ago. A rodent from the moon they’d refuelled at climbed in when Jet opened the garage to let Ruby run a few laps. Crawled up into the vents and made banshee noises that woke everybody up (save Peter) when it got stuck in a sharp turn. As the skinniest person in the crew, it was Vespa who had to get up on the huge ladder and put her head up in the ceiling vents and pray to God that the rat-creature wouldn’t run at her face.  
If this is indeed a noise that exists outside of Vespa’s brain, she hopes it’s something as innocuous as a lost rat. A problem she can solve with the salad tongs and some patience again. She will see.

First she wants to see Peter. Yesterday was rough for both of them. Peter, being the sick one, Vespa, being the one who treats his sickness and has to stay upbeat so they don’t have to acknowledge the spectre of death that shares the medbay with them. She feels the disease in him like it’s in her own flesh. The minutes on his clock tick down louder than the minutes on her own. Go back and tell the Vespa of a year and a half ago that she’d one day be cradling the guy on the hull to her like her own flesh and blood and she’d have laughed herself sick. Yeah, nice try. Pick somebody else. 

When Vespa is put into a situation of having to share a tight space with somebody else who is also a stranger, they tend to set off her paranoia. Big time. They blend into her hallucinations and adopt the tormenting white-noise voices of her brain. They change from friends to feral, fecund figures that creep from corner to corner of her vision and, if she sees them, if she can spin around fast enough and pin them to the spot with her eyes, they smile, re-paste the familiar face over their own and tell her that is who she has been looking at all along.  
Something about Peter was uncanny enough to set off her alarm bells, make him the star of a few nasty, nasty spells, put some of the foulest things she’s ever heard from her own brain in his mouth. And then, that night where everything went so bad for a minute it was like the whole of the Carte Blanche had been sucked into an unknown whirlpool of Space-Hell, then after that happened, she was still scared of him. But less scared? Less scared meant less testy around him, meant less stress, meant less hallucinations wearing his face and finally, a month later, when he had a pain-day that was worse than anything he’d ever had before, meant that Peter knew he could come to Vespa and ask for help. 

Time to find him. Three o’clock pm by the ship’s count. Vespa went down for her mid-afternoon nap just an hour ago. She takes a lot of naps these days. It’s a part of her prescription. Helps reign in the psychosis a little bit, if she’s well-rested, and today she is, so when she sees Juno standing in the dark doorway of his room she knows not to stop and talk to him because Juno’s not on the ship and his door isn’t even really open. Peter is next-door. Buddy said she did that on purpose, a little while ago, because she guessed what the thief and the detective meant to each other. Either it was gonna work out or it wasn’t and better to find out which way the scales were gonna tip. Don’t let it get in the way of the mission and all. It did and then it didn’t and now it’s kind of cute. 

Vespa knocks, calls out “Marco.”

“Polo.” comes the reply.

She opens the door. Peter’s lacing up the waist-trainer/pain-management-device-worth-more-than-Vespa’s-childhood-home. Looks good on him, a black that matches his hair, with black mother-of-pearl clasps that disguise the source of the painkilling effect. A sophisticated series of little circuits that discharge tiny, disruptive impulses. Something like that. Believable as a part of his usual style for sure, and you can hide it underneath a lot of disguises without making the figure too lumpy. 

He smiles at her “I kept it off for the morning.”

“Did you sleep in the car again?”

“After midnight-”

“You’re gonna destroy that pipe-cleaner you call a spine. Want some help?”

“No, I’ve just got one clasp to do.”

Folding her arms, Vespa leans against the wall. In the corner of her eye she sees a dark shape come up and fill the little bit of door she left open, she sees that it is her father, and she ignores him, but also wonders why she keeps seeing him these days. He went away for a few months and has come back stronger. What’s her brain think it is accomplishing by showing her an old dead man she doesn’t think about that much? What’s the agenda? Shoo, Pa, you’re weirding me out. 

Of course Peter notices her glance at the door, notices her frown “Do we have a guest?”

‘Guest’ is his word. Polite. Funny, too, because what’s he gonna do? Pull out a chair for them? 

“Yeah.”

“It’s just you and I and Ruby aboard, if that helps. Buddy and Rita left about an hour ago for that appointment.”

Buddy’s got a contact to meet. A guy with a lot of pull in the medical black-market. Rita’s going to look cute and harmless right up until the second she takes his bank account hostage, if he doesn’t do what Buddy wants. It’s a planned absence. Buddy doesn’t leave unless she knows Vespa will be ok and most of the time Vespa is ok. If she’s going to be totally alone, like, even Ruby is gone type-alone, she needs a bit of time to prepare herself

“I need a quick brain-check, actually.”

“Oh, certainly. What’s troubling you?”

Vespa prefers ‘brain-check’ over something gauche, like ‘reality-check’ because her brain makes her reality.  
“I’m hearing something crawl through the vents. Again. That’s not what I get normally.”

“And the last time you heard noises of that nature we had to turn around and drop off a lunar rat.” finishes Peter. 

They check her bedroom first. The man has got back into the corner. Peter stands close to him, not knowing he is there, and when he hears the first thump the surprise of it propels him a bit backwards. The man blurs where Peter’s back meets him; he refuses to be disappeared. Vespa grins at him as the blind eye finds her.

“How is it that our vents have become prime real-estate for rodent stowaways?”

“Sounds bigger than a rodent. Sounds Rita-sized to me.”

Shuddering, Peter backs towards the door. He moves past the man and the man is kind of wiped away, clean, like a sleeve going over a fogged window.  
“I’ll get the ladder.”

“Bring something you can swing, too, Pete.”

The thump sounds again. Less of a thump. More like, a rap. More like a little hand knocking on the ceiling. It knows that the humans know it’s there. It wants to be found. Is it asking for help? Is it animal? It could be a person. That’s how Vespa got her start.  
She took herself off the murder-capitol of Eris and drug-trafficking capitol of the Outer Rim by hiding herself in a closet on a gang ship. Some sap opened the door for a mop two hours later and had this Rangian urchin pop out instead, all froth and rage and fists up already to fight. He made her pick up the mop and clean up the spill in the on-board crystal lab and that was the start of Vespa doing what she does now. 

By the time Peter gets back with the ladder, Vespa has half-convinced herself that the poltergeist is in fact a scrappy pre-teen she is gonna have to take under her wing.

“Any change?” he sets the ladder up in the corner where the man stood, just beneath a grate.

Vespa shakes her head grimly “I never wanted kids. I got all the maternal instinct of a salmon. I wouldn’t mind if it were just, a spawn-drop and then the kid hatches and takes care of itself.”

Peter raises an eyebrow “I suspect I missed half of a conversation. Here, I’ll hold it for you.”

The grate comes away with a firm push. Person like Vespa should know better than to stick her head in a dark place with a possible threat in it. She has nightmares about this scenario on the weekly, about getting her face bitten off. But she does it anyway because if something knocks Peter off this ladder, he’ll probably burst something, and that’s gonna be make for an even worse day than if Vespa does get her face chewed on a bit. 

What stares back at Vespa in the dimness of the vent is really, really, really hard to describe. She holds its gaze for a minute. Then she calls down to Peter.

“I don’t know if this thing is just weird-looking or if my brain is playing tricks.”

“Here.” Peter pushes his comms into her hand “Take a photo.”

The creature sits where it is- squats, or crouches, or, or it’s hard to tell what its limbs are doing. Anyway, whatever it’s doing it keeps doing it while Vespa turns on the flash and takes a photo of it. The sharp light thrown up on its face is disconcerting. To her. The creature doesn’t care. It may not be aware of what’s happening to it.

She passes the comms back to Peter.

He needs a second to absorb what he’s seeing “Vespa, do you feel faint?”

“Naw.” slow as cold syrup, Vespa reaches for the creature “My second thought was gas leak but I don’t smell anything.”

“Carbon monoxide has no smell.”

“Not to you. Radiation poisoning makes your nose strong. Or it makes your brain think its nose is stronger. Hey, Pete, it’s letting me pet it.”

The creature has a texture between shower-caulk and old, warm soap. It reacts to her touch in a way that she’s gonna take as friendly, because it doesn’t bite her. Vespa rubs a tiny circle into the corner of its blobby face with her knuckle.

“Please do not touch it.”

“I’m gonna see if it wants to come out.”

Urgency in his voice, now “Vespa, please. I am begging you to leave that thing in the vents. We need to seal up the vents and let it die in there.”

“Just ‘cos it’s ugly as shit doesn’t mean it’s poisonous, Pete. Watch your head.”

After a bit of prompting the thing consents to be scooped up into Vespa’s arms and cradled. Instinctively, she supports its head the way she’d support an infant’s.

Peter lets out a low keen of disgust as she comes down with it in her arms, but at least he doesn’t run.

“Are those spines?”

Vespa shakes her head “I think it’s more like…really long, flaccid hair.”

Peter covers his mouth with a hand “This is actively worsening my health. Looking at that thing is actively making me sicker.”

Vespa lowers the creature to the ground. Sensing this, the creature pops five stubby legs out of its spined, flabby undercarriage which extend to meet the ground, giving it the height of a short kid or a tall toddler. It begins to wheeze in a way that doesn’t suggest distress, so much as it does that the creature has remembered that it’s got lungs and needs to use them. At last its many eyes come into focus. A barbed, split tongue lolls out of the ragged corner of its mouth and continues to unravel across the floor for almost half a metre. Peter steps smartly out of the tongue’s path.

“Pete, I’m a city kid. What is that?”

“I didn’t exactly come up on a farm. I have no idea.” 

Crouching, Vespa extends another, tentative hand to it. Immediately the creature rolls onto its belly. Vespa commits. She rubs the one spineless spot on its stomach, a patch between its middle legs. The creature makes a noise like a sink being unclogged. The distant tip of its tongue flicks with pleasure.

“I think it’s friendly.”

She looks up and finds that Peter has climbed up onto Buddy’s vanity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, what an episode that last one was. What a Vespasode. I was getting genuine chills from it even though I was on the treadmill while listening to it, and usually the only thing I feel on a treadmill is sweat-related or the fear that my bladder's about to fall out of me. Her internal monologue is a lot more choppy here, kind of experimental (for me) and doesn't match up to the one we got from the podcast, since I had all of her part written out before we got that episode. I went over it a bit but I kind of like what I came up with originally. Having said that, if anybody reading has experience with psychosis-related conditions and has some feedback about the way it's represented here, shoot me a message, I'm totally open to correction. No pressure, of course, and I hope everybody's staying as healthy as they can!


	7. Venti double-shot mocha and a chamomile tea for No One Of Consequence?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: setting which contains consensual sex work, mentions of sex work through a brothel, non-sexual nudity, sex-repulsed asexuality, sex-repulsed asexual in a very sexually suggestive setting, sexually suggestive furniture, one off mention of malevolent spirit from Judaic tradition, mentions of unhealthy power dynamic within a marriage, brief instance of gore consistent with getting a small cut, mentions of childhood homelessness, non-descriptive mentions of rats and r*aches in the context of urban vermin, megalophobia specific to medium/large animals,
> 
> Suggested listening: Buffy Saint Marie, 'God is alive, Magic is afoot' (I promise it's fitting after you get into the office)  
> 

It is not commonly known that Juno Steel worked as the personal investigator of the madam of the only sexless brothel in Hyperion City. Firstly, the common people don’t know about Juno Steel and secondly, those who do don’t know about that chapter of his life because Juno doesn’t like talking about it. This chapter coincided with the beginning of an enormous depressive spiral which Juno only started coming out of last year. He did a lot of things he is not proud of. He did plenty of things he is proud of, too, but they often occurred in seedy situations that will kind of detract from the goodness of what Juno did if he describes what lead him to it. Like, contextually, he was usually the good guy. You had to be there. Rita is the first person whom he has ever sat down and explained it all to in detail, and that was only because their job obligated him to disclose all the possible risks he might pose when Rita decided they were going to open an agency.  
In retrospect he feels stupid for confessing his sins to Rita, believing them to be grave and possibly unforgivable while Rita was hacking her way through every security system in the galaxy. Juno has learned not to assume he has not committed the worst and most possible crimes in any given group of people. The world is a lot bigger than what Juno feels shitty about. There are people who have killed and don’t lose sleep over it. Juno’s about to start a nasty brawl with a handful of them.

“You did what with a can-opener?”

Six o’clock on the seedy side of the pleasure district. Juno in acid-washed jeans and a smuggled turtleneck, Jet grey overalls that have never seen the inside of a garage and a t-shirt that makes him look like a TA (an impression made stronger by the bags under his eyes). The effect? World’s most normie couple, except for the missing eye. Every time Juno catches sight of their reflection in a glass-front or warped in a puddle, it takes him a second to connect the blurry people in the glass to him and his fake-husband.  
Juno definitely wouldn’t look twice at a couple like them walking into a brothel. Given his experience in the industry, he would assume they were a couple trying to spice things up in the bedroom because they’re each independently so boring in bed that they both fall asleep before finishing. So aggressively normal, so determinedly average. Unless you start to eavesdrop. 

“Don’t shy away from me like that, buster.” Juno links his arm through Jet’s “There was a good reason for it! I didn’t want to do it, but my hand was forced and- and, let’s not go over all this again. Let’s just hope that nobody here franchise hopped from Vickey’s business to an independent brothel. And stop that!”

“Stop what?”

“Stop crossing your legs!”

“Pardon me for having a reflexive reaction to the horror story you just told me.”

“It wasn’t a threat, Jet! Honestly I was trying to comfort you because I know you get uncomfortable in, uh, sexy situations.”

He cranes away from Juno again “So, say, if one of these workers gyrates in my direction, then you will leap to defend my honour brandishing a can-opener-”

“Yeah that’s the exact goddamn message I wanted you to take away from this.” 

If ever there were a person with whom Juno were going to make a midnight run to a brothel, he could not have guessed that person would be Jet. As an asexual whose tends towards sex-repulsion, Jet doesn’t actively seek out situations where he’s exposed to sexy atmospheres and takes himself right the hell out of situations where it arises unexpectedly. It’s fine that other people like it and talk about it, but Jet is good where he is, which is far, far removed from the world of sex. So naturally, when he walks into a brothel, he’s going to have a bit of a problem. 

One minute he’s being ham-fistedly comforted by Juno, assured that it won’t be so bad and Juno won’t let anybody flirt with him, and the next minute he is trapped in a low-lit den of fleshy decadence. Even Juno is a bit taken aback. The business model he is used to doesn’t let its employees wander through the lobby in the buff- they make you pay before seeing the goods. The fact that some of them are squeezed into thongs or falling out of sheer lingerie makes it all the more obscene. The few fully-clothed people dotted in between are customers: people who have come straight off of their work-days and are now leafing through brochures, talking over hourly rates and packets with their chosen partner/s. At their entry, a few heads turned, and a few indiscreet, appreciative murmurs were exchanged. Most of them seem to be for Jet. Earthlings are a rare commodity anywhere, and are of especial interest in a brothel because of the unique investigative opportunity the work may present.  
Feeling Jet attempt to pivot on his heel and make an escape, Juno grasps his arm with both hands and pulls him along, Jet’s shoes scooting across the frictionless mirrored floor. Seriously, mirrors on the floor. Who wants to know what their own crotch looks like while they’re walking? Juno doesn’t envy the poor janitor who cleans off the footprints at the end of business hours. 

Jet mutters something under his breath in his dialect of Inupiat, shielding his eyes as if against the sun as a well-endowed person brushes past him. 

Juno, for his part, isn’t bothered by the rampant nudity. Working for Vickey Vallas for as many years as he did has desensitised him somewhat to strangers’ naked bodies. He doesn’t get excited about it unless the body on display happens to belong to someone he is interested in.  
What worries him more is that someone might recognise him. He has gone to some lengths to protect his identity in case of unlucky coincidences like Julian, and it was normal for career sex-workers to use Vallas’s place as a stepping-stone for higher-paying work. On satellites, for example. Back when Vickey Vallas used to talk about franchising the Vixens, she insisted settler-satellites were a gold mine. She claimed that her business model prevented all accusations of cheating. It doesn’t count if you’re just looking! Makes Juno wonder how well Vickey’s marriage is going.

“Look out for a desk. A secretary or something.” he mutters to Jet.

“Absolutely not,” Jet’s eyes are trained on his own shoes “I am not looking at anything.”

“Do you want my eyepatch?”

“You’re joking but I may take you up on that.”

Fortunately for their nerves, the lobby is clearly labelled. An obscenely shaped sign points them down a short hallway that opens up onto a smaller space, draped with red curtains, a white ceramic desk raised in the middle like a pulpit. Julian perches on an egg-cup stool 

Juno needn’t have worried: Julian is just behind the desk. His head is bowed over a red ledger of names and figures, which he has angled towards himself so the names are difficult to read. The numbers are not, however, and make Juno’s poor-kid stomach sink to his feet. What the hell are they doing here that could merit those kinds of numbers? Are the riding crops made of gold? Do they make their condoms and dental dams out of silk?  
Jet shrinks into Juno as another person with a bosom that puts Buddy’s to shame passes by, possibly closer to Jet than is necessary.

He clears his throat.

Julian looks up, surprised but not displeased “Ju- uh, Ishtar, hi! What are you doing here?”

“Are you free?”

Confusion crosses his face “For what? For, uh,” he gestures about them “Because I’m not sure if I can provide that-”

“No! God, no, no, that’s too weird, I wouldn’t ask you to do that!”

Relaxing, Julian shuts the ledger “It’s not that I don’t like you, Ishtar, and I’m sure Aileron is very nice…anyway, what’s on your mind?”

“It’s kind of private. But, again, let me stress how much this is not about sex stuff.” 

Julian’s office is a nice space trapped between being neatly, functionally modern and plush like a historically accurate wet dream. Every object is a different shade of yonic reds and pinks that make it seem as if they have just wandered inside a vagina. His desk is in the shape of an ambiguously gendered human silhouette with their arms folded above their head and their legs separating at the knees. A mosaic lamp stands behind him, casting soft light in all the colours of the rainbow so, when Juno glances at Jet to see if the sexy desk also reminds him of something that Buddy would put in the dining room to assert her authority, Jet’s face is dyed a nauseous shade of green.  
Silently, Juno takes Jet’s hand and squeezes, and this is Julian’s first real clue that something is off. The gesture is so devoid of romance, it is like a mutual, unspoken agreement to lower the facades; there is no point in maintaining a cover here.

Juno slouches and pulls his eyepatch down around his neck, letting his scar breathe. He enjoys the confused repulsion that flashes across Julian’s face. The confusion redoubles as he Jet straightens up, releasing the tension in his shoulders from the way he has had to hold himself, as if he were a much smaller, less threatening man. With his free hand, Jet unpins his braid from a coiled bun and lets it spill down his back. 

Julian is somewhere between wounded that he has to be the one who says it, and relieved that the tiny suspicion he must have held was true after all “You lied to me.”

Pushing the hair off his scar, Juno tries to get comfortable in the chair. He has no idea if this chair is supposed to feel like the lap of a person on the edge of arousal or if the setting has made him paranoid.  
“Sorry, Damien. I didn’t know if you were part the Wellness Centre or not.”

“I am, for what’s it worth,” he searches their faces for fear and, when he finds none, gives a sulky smile “Not deeply into ‘it’. I don’t drink the supplement. You don’t need the supplement to get the best of the benefits they offer. After I was ousted from Saffron, I promised myself that I wasn’t going to have anything to do with body-alterations or cleanses or any of those other snake oils I used to peddle. I stand by that, Juno.”

Ok, weird that he’s focussing on the ‘health and wellness’ angle of the problem. “I’m sure you do, but that’s not what I’m worried about. I’m worried about what those…those addicts have in their basement.”

“Who are you working for?”

“I’m working for myself.” Which is not strictly a lie: the faster Juno figures out if this place has a connection to the cure-mother prime, the faster he can get on finding the real thing and blasting the cysts out of Nureyev’s organs.  
Also, if that thing in the basement is not an essential asset to their efforts Juno has decided he’s going to blow it up. After he takes a baseball bat to it. After he throws Kayrrine and her lieutenants out a third-story window for taking him down there in the first place. 

He scoffs “No you’re not. Detectives can’t self-employ.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not a detective anymore. Not strictly.”

“Well what the hell are you?”

Juno throws his hands up “Healing! I’m healing, ok? And I’d like to get the hell out of here so I can keep healing!”  
The more frustrated he gets the more certain Juno becomes that there is a person hiding in his chair, getting off on the conflict. 

“Wait, wait. Before you say anything else, I want to know who the hell he is.” Julian’s gaze turns to Jet. 

Not hostile, not welcoming. Intrigued. 

Juno shrugs “Well why don’t you ask him?”

“I’m guessing your real name isn’t Aileron, or Emanoraq. Who are you?”

Jet shifts in his chair “No one of consequence.”

Cute. That’s also what he says for take-away café orders. Drives Juno nuts how many baristas actually call that out. 

“You’re not married to Juno?”

“No. That is not to say that Juno has no importance within my life.”

“So, what, boyfriend? Partner? Because you look better, Juno, and I wondered if part of that was meeting somebody new.”

“Maybe. I’m also just taking better care of myself. Go on, big guy, tell Julian who you are to me.”

“I am Juno’s gym partner.” says Jet. 

Groaning, Julian reaches into the top-drawer of his desk and draws out a silver cigarette holder “I’m going to have to smoke for this, I think. Ok, Juno, why are you and your long-lost second-cousin or whatever in my office?”

Juno summons his courage and spits it out “The real question, Julian, is what is my twenty-years dead brother doing in the basement of the Wellness Centre?”

Julian freezes, his hand clenched around a lighter. His thumb hovers over the trigger, then snaps the lighter shut. He leans forwards with each of his hands spread on the table, and smiles.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

Heat races through his blood. Juno bites his tongue and swallows the first, angry words that come to him, and squeezes Jet’s hand until he can find something to say that does not involve every swear word in his dialect.  
“That’s not what I would call it. Traumatising. One of the worst things that was ever done to me.”

Julian shakes his head “See, that was my thinking too, at first. You need time to process it, Juno. When did you see, uh, Benjamin?”

“Benzaiten. And I didn’t see him. I saw something pretending to be him.”

“When was it?” Julian looks to Jet “Last night? This morning?”

God, sometimes Juno wishes he wasn’t trying to be less of a lashing-out type. If ever there were a time to externalise his trauma it would be now, by vaulting over Julian’s stupid horny desk and punching some answers out of the myopic motherfucker.

“No, really, who are you? I feel like I know your face.”

“Again, who I am has no bearing to our work here-” Jet springs out of his chair “Am I the only one whose chair has an erection?”

Juno lifts himself off the cushion by the arm-rests “I thought I was losing my mind. What is wrong with you? Why do you have these chairs?”

Julian shrugs “They came with the office. They’re bolted down.”

“And you didn’t think to unbolt them? God, it’s getting bigger-” Juno rolls sideways out of the chair and away from the offending object. Jet catches him before he can face-plant, standing him up behind the chairs. In a way Juno is kind of grateful to have an excuse for a barrier between them and Julian. If he ends up needing to pull the gun he’s got in his purse (not that he’s got any confidence in his aim) then at least he’s got some cover.

Whatever interest Julian had in Juno has transferred entirely to the Earthling, now. Thoughtfully, Julian leans forward in his presumably bonerless chair and picks up a second cigarette from a handful sitting unburned in a breast-shaped ashtray.

“You delivered something to my husband, once. It was one of those clandestine exchanges I wasn’t supposed to see. Anthony kept me away from the shady parts of our business as much as he could, but it didn’t always work.”

“Eleven years ago. I went to see what was keeping Anthony from dinner and you were in his office. Most of his…his independent contractors had forgettable faces. They looked like me or Juno, like our friends or our servants. And I could tell you wanted to have a forgettable face, but you’re Earthling. You guys stand out. Besides, I’d never seen such pretty hair before. That’s what it is.” Julian blows a wisp of peppermint-scented smoke from his nostrils “I remember your hair.”

“Hm.” is Jet’s response.

Juno does not like the way Julian is looking at him. The curiosity has changed to something darker. To a desire, perhaps, to possess, or understand and therefore possess what Jet wants to keep from him. 

Julian speaks as if calling to a person in another room “Anthony! What was this guy’s name?”

Tensing, Juno reaches for his purse, but Jet’s hand is already there, blocking him. He shakes his head. Above, the light flickers out and plunges them into a red dimness. The air thickens and greys. Juno’s stomach flips and his limbs buzz because he recognises what this is- this is what was in the basement, rising to meet them kilometres away from its source. 

Julian sits still. His attitude is expectant and unafraid. Behind him the mist solidifies into an opaque wall, hardly moving. 

Juno’s throat closes “Jet-”

The mist walks. 

Jet seizes Juno about the waist and pulls him backwards, off his feet, retreating to the entrance of the room. 

The mist resolves itself, at last, into the trim figure of a man whose face was once one of the best known in Hyperion City. A strong figure whose youth no longer looks manufactured, but natural and rude, washing Julian out by comparison. A painted hand alights on Julian’s shoulder and the man, Anthony as he was in his prime, stoops to put his saffron-coloured lips beside his husband’s ear. His lips graze Julian’s diamond stud as he whispers. The sound of his voice only just reaches across the room. It is an approximation of a voice. Rasping and clumsy with its breath, as if the speaker is not yet sure how to use a human throat. Julian’s eyebrows lift. His smile becomes hungry as he turns to face the thing wearing his husband’s face.

“Really?”

Expressionless, Anthony nods.

Julian’s smile grows wider “Thanks, pele.” 

He kisses Anthony. Anthony lets himself be kissed. There is no reaction- not even a movement of reciprocation, or rejection, or acknowledgement. The thing stands still and allows itself to be kissed and when Julian lets go, it turns around, obeying a silent dismissal, and drifts towards the fog-wall behind Julian’s desk.

“I’ll see you later.” says Julian without looking back. 

The edges of Anthony blur and whiten to the same sickly shade of white, liquefying, collapsing into a puddle that dissolves even as it hits the polished floor. A sigh or a hiss echoes through the room, retreating through the floor, and the fog pools and spirals into the invisible drain, and the lights glare back to life, and Juno is gasping with his face hidden in Jet’s bicep just trying to breathe.  
Beneath his eyelid, the thing wearing Benzaiten’s face watches him. A reflection that has climbed out of the mirror. A ghost who has forgotten the lives and names of those it should be haunting. Dead, dead, dead-

Juno makes himself breathe. He grounds himself against the pulsing panic in his gut with the feeling of Jet’s arms on him. He is fine. He is safe. Jet is here, he is fine, he is safe.

“Jesus and Krishna. I’ve got Jet Sikuliaq in my office.” Julian rolls the name on his tongue like a hard candy, testing its flavour “Jet Sikuliaq the Unnatural Disaster, the thief of the Iris of Jupiter, murderer of M’tendere Beza. What the hell did you get into Juno, to snag yourself a guy like this?”

Juno’s feet are still off the floor. He squeezes Jet’s arms to let him know that he would like to be put down, please. 

“You don’t have to recite his CV to me,” Juno is surprised to hear himself growling “I know who he is.”

Jet sounds rough too. Shaken “What was that?”

“My husband,” Julian drags from his cigarette “You didn’t talk to Benzaiten, did you? I get it. I ran the first time. Second time too. But the third time, I finally got the courage up to talk to him and he knew things only Anthony would know. Things I said to him in private.”

Juno snaps before he can stop himself “No, that was not Anthony! How the hell could you think that was human? That was some kind of dybbuk! I cannot believe you just kissed it!”

“It’s alright, Juno, let it all out. You too, Mr Sikuliaq. I can see that you’re not happy about it either. Vent as much as you want. I understand, I promise. It’s an upsetting experience the first few times, like I’ve been saying.”

Jet is not satisfied “What exactly was that supposed to be? What did they tell you?”

“It’s hard to explain. You’re better off asking Kayrrine directly.”

On one hand, Juno kind of gets it. Julian gets his husband back- a likeness of him. Stare at something like that long enough, want it to be true badly enough, and you’ll start to accept the thing for what it appears to be. Julian is evading their questions with all the practiced ease of someone who has quashed these own questions within themselves. He probably doesn’t know where this Anthony is coming from. If he thinks about the mechanisms that summon this thing, apparently whenever he wants to see it, then the illusion will rip and fray at the edges until it falls off the loom entirely. And, knowing Julian, knowing the stubbornness that carried him through Hoosegow and a difficult marriage, Juno can guess that he’s applied that same attitude here.  
With this incarnation of Anthony, it is Julian who can beckons and dismisses. Shade-Anthony is scheduled around the whims and work of his husband. He cannot complain. He cannot guilt Julian. He doesn’t seem to be able to do anything but respond to the most basic of commands. And Julian is just fine with that.

Juno knows what it’s like to be trapped with a controlling partner, and he also knows what it’s like to have a partner who couldn’t give less of a shit about whether or not he has any influence over Juno’s actions.  
Except as they relate to self-preservation: “I hope, Juno, every time you imagine risking your life and limb when there is another solution, you also imagine how fetching I will look in my mourning whites, and know that you will miss that because you are dead.” and other such Nureyev-style rhetoric.

So, having been in that particular crock of shit, having escaped it for a better life that eventually gave him the opportunity to have the healthy relationship he has now, Juno cannot sympathise with Julian wanting to get back at Anthony. Bringing his husband’s mortal soul from death on a whim is bad enough, but this is what he brings him to? Come on, Julian. Be better than that.

But there is also a comfort in what Juno has just seen. Now he doesn’t feel as bad about using Julian for information as he worried he would.

“Treelore Jiwe.”

Something flashes over Julian’s face. A flash of fear or regret which he quickly disguises as a scowl.

“Treelore Jiwe.” Juno repeats “Did you know him?”

“He was a regular. His partner knew and didn’t have a problem with it, before you start in on that adultery angle. Come away from the door, Juno, you’re making me nervous.”

“Yeah, well, be nervous! I’m not gonna sit on your pervert chairs.”

That makes Julian laugh “Suit yourself. So you want to know what got Treelore killed? I thought you said you’re not a detective anymore. And you, Mr Sikuliaq, you’re playing Watson?

“I do not think you have a correct understand of the situation.” returns Jet “Nor do you seem to be connecting to the reality of how serious this is.”

Approaching the desk, Jet picks up the ashtray and, with one hand, squeezes the ceramic to splinters and dust. Extending his arm, he opens his hand upside-down and lets the pieces fall to the carpet. A few drops of blood fall along with them, but the cuts don’t seem to bother Jet. 

“And think carefully about how you want to answer the next question my friend asks you.”

Juno is caught between impressed that Jet just made such a direct threat and wanting to giggle because he chose to do it with the one breast-shaped object in the room. God, if nothing else, they need to get their comms connection back so he can tell Buddy and the others that Jet touched a boob today.

“Who figured out what Treelore did?” asks Juno.

Sweat beads Julian’s brow. His eyes move between Juno and the fist curled and dripping at Jet’s side.  
“His partner, Nadeing. He told her. She didn’t want to leave. Her friends are here. Her life.”

“So what? She had him killed?”

Julian shakes his head “She said…the way that Treelore told it to me, she said she wanted some counselling before they made any big choices. She promised Treelore that she wouldn’t be specific about their problem. Just call it a ‘communication problem’ or something. But she must have told Kayrrine what he wanted to do.”

“And she just let them kill him? How, Julian? Did you see what happened to his body? How does that happen to a person?”

Jet shoots a look of warning over his shoulder- calm down, Juno. Have patience. He’s right. Juno shouldn’t be taking his cues from Jet for gods sakes he should know better by now…but patience with himself, too. 

“I don’t know.”

“Guess, then.” says Jet.

Julian’s cigarette has burned down to the butt. Without an ashtray to contain it, Julian has no choice but to let the ashes spill out and wait for it to cool between his fingers so he won’t burn his desk.

“I don’t know. Treelore had just come from seeing me and he was fine. He was healthy. He was optimistic about the future. The next I heard about him was that he was dead. Nadeing called me, actually, she wanted to be the one to tell me. She…he just, kind of, exploded, in the street. His head blew apart on its own. And then the rest of him. She said he flew apart like a bunch of invisible jaws got at him at the same time, but there was no noise. She wasn’t- well, she wasn’t crying, but I could tell she didn’t like seeing it.”

“Why did she call you, Julian? Why are you important enough that she’d call you?”

“To tell me not to hold Treelore’s appointment anymore, I guess.” 

Jet leans forwards and puts both hands on the desk. He’s much taller than Julian even when he bends like that.

And that’s all the encouragement that Julian needs to tell the truth.  
“Ok, ok. I’m sorry. She thought he left something with me.”

Jet opens his stained hand. Obediently, Julian opens the topmost drawer of his desk and surrenders a slim manila folder. The flop sweat is just pouring off him now. Good thing that bathrobe is a light cotton blend.

Straightening, Jet opens the folder “Thank you.”

“They’re good people.” blurts Julian “Most of them are good people, Juno. People who think what they’re doing is good. They started out wanting to help each other. Kayrrine thought she’d take the money and make something good out of it, but it got ahead of her, and then Jiorjah came along and they gummed everything up. They took advantage, and it’s not as good as it used to be…they just wanted to help.”

Juno sighs. The anger flows out of him as easy as breath “Whatever they wanted to do when the Wellness Centre started, it’s out of hand now. It’s time for it to be over. The people who want to do good can scatter and find somewhere else to do it.”

“Juno.” 

Jet beckons him with a grave face, and Julian does not take this as his cue to stop talking. In fact he seems to have decided that he’s going to tell Juno everything he can before the folder speaks for itself. 

“They didn’t know it was alive- alive. It was just reacting. Nothing else we ever found that looked alive or organic really was! Anthony and I, we found a hundred things like it on Mars and they all turned out to be corpses. We assumed! And when we found out it was awake, it was too late…”

He trails off as Jet lowers the folder to Juno’s level. One look is enough to tell Juno the gist of it. 

Recognising his shock, Julian rises “It’s not that surprising if you think about it! They lived a lot longer than we do. They were hardy enough to survive the radiation and the heat. If it seems impossible, it’s only because we don’t know enough about them… come on, Juno. Don’t look at me like that.”

Juno has covered his mouth. The behind his scarred eyelid aches. In his head, Miasma’s voice whispers wordlessly. 

“When did you find it out?”

“After The Platonium had already been built. It was too late to back-pedal. There were sacrifices and arrangements, there was too much to undo. Too many people depend on this working.”

Jet laughs “And look at how well it has turned out for you. At least I understand the ghosts, now. If I were a telepath locked in a laboratory, I would project any form I thought might make my tormenters kinder to me.”

Snapping the folder shut, Jet folds it several times (folds construction paper- goddamn Earthlings) and puts it in his back pocket. He takes Juno’s arm gently and steers him towards the exit.

“That’s not what it is!” Julian calls after them “It really can bridge the dead and the living! I know my husband when I see him-”

Jet shuts the door on him in mid-sentence and, using Juno like a battering ram, parts the small crowd of half-naked nubiles eavesdropping at the door and gets them out into the sun in under a minute. By the time Juno is able to both have a coherent thought and articulate it again, they are back on the tram to the ground level. Homewards bound.

“They got a Martian in their basement!” he exclaims.

“I saw. And mind your volume, dear, this is the silent car.”

(The Carte Blanche, now)

When one lives an ever-changing life like Nureyev, where his personality had to be fluid and adaptable to survive each new situation, one’s ‘true self’ is sort of sectioned off from the rest of the world. Compartmentalised in a chest that was quite apart from the shelves of memory and repression- a jumble of things he kept pushed to the back of his mind, disorganised and horrifying, and never completely locked so that they were forever ambushing Nureyev just when he thought he was safe from himself. These traits emerge as the common threads amongst all the names he has ever assumed: he rarely drinks, he holds himself with dignity, he does his best to maintain a level of integrity when he chooses his jobs and friends and, perhaps most importantly, he is fucking terrified of large and unfamiliar animals.

In spite of living most of his conscious life outside of the planetoid and avoiding it, Nureyev is fundamentally a Brahmese man, with habits unique to those who come up in the dirt beneath New Kinshasa. Therefore, he is not afraid of common vermin. Rats, mice, roaches, crows, coyotes, hyenas- whatever. Nureyev used to sleep beneath the docks on a damp pallet with a handful of the urchins, and they always welcomed the company of urban rats and canines because they cuddled for warmth. Perhaps they were competitors for food during the day, but at night it was either spoon your neighbours or get frostbite.  
So anything that looks like a dog gets a pass. Nureyev loves dogs. He can tolerate cats as long as they don’t try to sit on him. But any other animal? Anything that’s half his size or bigger than him? They can all get fucked. Sometimes just looking at a picture of an animal that is clearly larger can make him nauseous. 

Jet told him a story, once, about sitting between his father’s knees in a kayak when he was too young to be trusted to paddle his own. A pod of whales happened to be surfacing in the bay at the same time and apparently, one of the motherfuckers decided to be playful by surfacing underneath them so that Jet and his father got an unexpected ride on the back of a whale for a few metres. He spoke of it as a fond memory, but just hearing it made Nureyev feel like he’d been kicked in the stomach. Nureyev is fairly sure he would have died on the spot if that happened to him- just, fainted overboard and let the water take him.

While Vespa knows about his chronic illness, she hasn’t got a clue how terrified Nureyev actually is of the wheezing creature she pulled out of the vents. She chalks his skittishness up to a city kid’s natural suspicion of animals, and for the moment Nureyev is happy to let her. He is still a private person. He must keep some of his secrets. If that secret happens to be the extent to which having this animal, this animal that looks like a sneeze given form and flesh, is going to affect his ability to function.

“Let’s call it Guapo.” says Rita.

“No.” say Buddy and Vespa in unison.

Buddy was not happy to come home to the scene that she did. Nor was she unhappy. Mainly, she was confused, and she wanted Nureyev to stop standing on the couch like that because he’d get a nasty bruise if he slipped. 

“Don’t get attached, Rita,” Buddy continues. The distaste is evident in her voice as she looks at the creature “We are not going to keep it. Firstly, it would be immoral to keep a creature which we do not know how to care for. Secondly, I am afraid it is one of the most repulsive things I have ever my eyes on and I refuse to keep it on my ship any longer than circumstances compel me.”

For most of the morning the creature had crouched facing into a corner, possibly napping, possibly having an anxiety attack. Nureyev could sympathise- and could go about his business in relative ease as long as he was sure the thing was not moving.  
But about fifteen minutes ago, when they sat down in the kitchen for one of Buddy’s patented family meetings, the creature was attracted by the voices. Vespa’s specifically. It laboured straight over to her and plopped its thorny, spongey self down at her feet as smug as a bloodhound after a good hunt. Nureyev can hear it wheezing beneath the table. Every now and then, Vespa reaches down and absently scratches the thing between the two sort of thickened spines they have decided are its ears.  
Fortunately, he chose the seat furthest from Vespa before the creature wandered in, so by crossing his legs and craning away from the damp heat of its body, he can almost pretend that it isn’t there. The only thing he cannot disguise is that fear tends to leach the colour from his face. Rita keeps throwing him sidelong looks as if waiting for him to faint to the floor. 

“Stop bullying him,” Vespa pouts at her wife “Let him be ugly in peace.”

“I would if you would stop touching it.”

Nureyev clears his throat “Perhaps we can return to the matter at hand?”

“Yes, yes, sorry. Juno and Jet.” Buddy’s face darkens again “We need to tell Juno that we’ve discovered the pad-thai thief.”

Nureyev wants to be mad at her for appearing so flippant when their two undercovers have gone dark, missing two of their scheduled check-ins. There is an off-chance that, maybe, if Juno has gotten really caught up in the thick of what he’s doing, he might forget to call, but there is no justification for Jet to have gone dark also. Jet is the kind of person who, given a choice between keeping a limb and an appointment, would choose the appointment. Whatever has happened on The Platonium has to be bad.  
Rita is working on it just now. Through some horrible Frakenstein-style hacking, Rita has found a tiny backdoor into the security systems around The Platonium and is in the process of combing through the personal comms numbers of the residents. At the moment, their plan is to find numbers belonging to Jet and Juno’s neighbours or someone whom they are likely to be talking and hope they get the call. Rita’s other idea is even more unhinged and involves hacking visibly into the surveillance systems to find Jet and Juno’s unique biological identifiers, and then somehow utilise the public infrastructure to speak to them. Morse code through the streetlamps. Spelling out messages on a traffic advisory sign. Pipe Rita’s own voice through the throats of the one of the drone-parrots that strip away an extra layer of privacy in that place. 

But first, the numbers. As usual Rita’s keeping one eye and ear concentrated on her work; the conversation at the table gets the other two. Not that they’re talking about anything important. Every time they try, the creature does something weird and causes the conversation to loop back to him- which Vespa has decided the creature is, on the basis that “he holds himself like a man”, whatever that means. 

“I bet Jet knows what this guy is,” Vespa stoops and flicks one of the creature’s flaccid head-spines, which bobs like a top-heavy flower in a strong wind “I’ve heard that Earth is full of weird looking stuff like this.”

Rita purses her lips “It’s kinda not, though.”

Topping off her cup of coffee (brewed to a strength that would kill someone like Nureyev, with his compromised kidneys), Buddy nods and spins a paper about to face Nureyev “Sorry, darlings. I’m veering all over the road today. This has not gone according to plan. Nothing today has gone according to plan. I couldn’t even get my bra on right today, if you’ll pardon my bringing it up at the table. This is what we got from Noorssen.”

Nureyev blinks “Wait, Noorssen in the flesh? Rauho Noorssen saw you personally?”

“A perfect ambush. It surprised me as well. Imagine, Rita and I expected to meet with the lieutenant of a lieutenant. I hadn’t heard that he was getting out and about again.”

Rauho Noorssen has always vacillated between two particular types of criminal lifestyle: sometimes he is flashy and bold and goes about displaying the jewelled fruits of his work, and sometimes he retreats and plays at being the hermetic patriarch of his organ-farming empire. For the last three or four years Noorssen has been decidedly absent from his operations, happy to let his lieutenant-children (adopted and raised for the job, which makes Nureyev hate him) run the business the way they supposedly will if Noorssen ever dies. Given his involvement in the medical industries there is some doubt as to whether or not Noorssen is still mortal. However long the most cutting edge of medical technology and therapy can stretch the human body on, that is how long Noorssen will live.  
So of course Noorssen is notoriously paranoid about risking his immortal body by venturing out into the public. Under ordinary circumstances, if Noorssen wanted to see Buddy then he would have summoned her to one of his many properties and spoke from behind a laser-proof sheet of glass. 

Reading the confusion on Nureyev’s face, Buddy shrugs “It’s the nature of our target, darling. All that fat cats are coming out of the woods to see if they can’t get in on the hunt themselves. Noorssen offered to fund us completely.”

“Long as he got a big slice of profit.” adds Rita.

Vespa cusses “So that takes him out of the running, huh? Shit. Alright. Well, the good news is Jet’s friend who does Hanataba out in Ceres got back to me today. They can give us about- hey, stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“Not you, Pete.” Vespa twists and lifts her leg straight out in the air. “Stop chewing on my sock.”

To Nureyev’s horror and Rita’s amusement, a long barbed tongue follows Vespa’s ankle up and wraps around her. Vespa gives it a few shakes, gives up and lowers her leg, letting the vent creature cling to her. Silently, Nureyev imagines the creature’s tongue finding his limbs beneath the table, and vows to himself that if that happens, he will at least try to make it out of the room before he faints. The thought of that thing climbing atop his prone body makes him sicker than ever. 

“What did you write down?”

Buddy pushes the paper a little further towards him “Well, he lead with the idea that he would be funding the operation in full for profit. I figured that I might as well let the most seasoned medical baron of our time give advice before I told him where he could put his 70%.”

Rita shakes her head, her scrunchied-up curls bobbing along morosely “Shameful ‘a him! Tryin’ to make so much more money when he already got more’n he an’ his kids can ever spend. “

Nureyev taps one of the hasty bullet-points “Why have you outlined ‘juice’ eight times?”

“Oh shoot!” she snaps her fingers “Rita, we forgot to pick up the damn orange juice! Bloody hell- every time Jetffrey leaves, I completely bungle the groceries. It’s a good thing I don’t have to feed myself anymore. Sorry, Vespa.”

Vespa pats her wife’s hand “That’s fine, Bud. I’ll figure out what else the little man likes to drink.”

“I don’t drink orange juice.”

“I was talking about the thing,” Vespa points under the table “Why in god’s good name would I call you ‘the little man’? Or talk about you in third person when you’re right there!”

His cheeks heat up “I don’t know! Brain fog is a thing!”

Rita pats his shoulder sympathetically, having to reach for him so hard that it takes all but the extreme edge of her left butt-cheek out of her seat “Anyway, the point we was gettin’ at is we’re gonna have a hard time findin’ people who’re gonna let us use their facilities without wantin’ what we’re gonna make, ya know? ‘Cos, everybody knows what we’re up to by now.”

“That’s the problem of having a reputation. It brings just about the same amount of trouble- what effort you’re spared, you spend dealing with other problems. If Vespa and I were no-names like you, Rita dear, or anonymous, like you, whatever your real name is-”

“I’ll never tell.” says Nureyev, on automatic. 

Buddy smiles and closes her calloused hand over his, briefly “This would be much easier. But, alas, the rest of us have names and histories attached to them. There is nowhere in the Outer Rim that at least one of us is not known. Furthermore, if we do in fact discover a source of the cure-mother prime before we nail down the facilities for mass-production, we may have an entirely new problem.”

“Defending it.” finishes Vespa.

“Indeed. Peter, what have you got in terms of quick jobs? I’ll feel better about the possibility of having to hire our own staff once we get a bit more in the family coffers.”

Nureyev wrote his list down too, because he finds it helps to have something to draw on when they workshop a job “Right column is simple heists, left column is scams and this brainstorm bubble on the outside is a few things that occurred to me later.”  
Specifically while he was in the shower. A lot of his best ideas have come to him in there, or when stuck in the lounge of a spaceport. Something about heat and boredom greases the cogs of his brain.

As one, Vespa and Buddy lean forwards. 

“Well we’re closest to the Outer Rim planets. No sense in crossing the solar border.”

“Can’t do too close to here. Look, the Trojans are only a few light-years away, and whatever the Trojans know the Greeks know as well. We should go towards the dwarf planets. When Peter lets Ruby out to do her laps, she’s been going by some of the commuter lines. If those ships see her there then they’re gonna be on alert.”

“That depends on the common commuter line pilot being able to recognise the significance of Ruby’s presence, though.”

“Don’t have to be in the know to know what Jet Sikuliaq’s car looks like.”

“Well, most people assume she is red.”

“Huh. Point. Hey, Rita, what colour is Ruby7 in the streams?”

Rita barely glances up from her screen “Depends on which stream you’re talking about. She was a highly polished crimson in ‘The Eye of the Unnatural Hurricane’, then she was a sort of pinky purply colour in ‘Dial M for M’tendere’- and that one’s a funny one because you can tell from lookin’ at Mr Jet that he’s an Earthling, but they had him played by a Spacer in stilts and it kinda ruined the immersion for me. You can tell, all the way through the movie, like 90% of the actor’s energy is focussed on not breakin’ his face.”

“But not, like, lime green?”

“Naw Ms Vespa, she never was! It’s kinda an ugly colour. It don’t show up too good on the cameras.”

Nureyev has to defend his car’s honour “Which she wears very well!”

Then, from the garage, there is a sudden, loud honk. At first Nureyev thinks Ruby must have heard Rita and is protesting for herself. After the second round he knows something is wrong.

Forgetting to be afraid to walk past the vent creature, Nureyev jogs to the garage. He can tell by the tone that Ruby is nervous.

“What’s wrong?”

Ruby rolls down the window nearest to him and turns her wheel, beckoning him over. Gamely, Nureyev leans through the open window and watches as a sonar screen briefly replaces her rear-view mirror. There are three blips: one must be the CB, the littler one inside it is Ruby and that third, drawing swiftly alongside the CB, that one Nureyev cannot explain.

“Buddy! Are we expecting company?”

“No!” he can hear her following from the kitchen “Does Ruby think someone is coming?”

Nureyev draws a knife from the sheath beneath his pant-sleeve. Juno may mock him for wearing a minimum of three concealed knives at all times, but it is proven again and again that it pays to be prepared “According to her sonar, they’re almost in docking position.” 

Ruby whistles. A second later, as if in response, the ship’s intercom makes the sound that means an incoming transmission is about to be broadcasted. Normally, they’d have to accept it first. Whoever has just come alongside them has some powerful technology, to remotely hack into the CB’s internal systems.

Unfortunately, Nureyev recognises the voice.

La Charladora is far too close to the microphone for someone whose empire partly depends upon recording equipment “Ciao ciao, Carte Blanche! It’s Charla! Sorry to drop in unannounced, but I’ve heard on the solar grapevine that you’re having a bit of a problem with my mission. Mind letting me aboard? I’d love to chat about it.”

And then a bang on the hull- the sound of a forced docking.

Buddy looks at Nureyev and mutters a single word: “Hide.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Made the horrifying discovery the other day that, apparently, some pray mantids can fly. I was just unlacing my shoes on the porch, being an innocent, unobtrusive presence and the bug decided I was a threat anyway, and let me tell you, it's a good thing I've got a strong front door that can take some punishment because I about body-checked that thing to get away. Call me a coward if you wish but when you live in a tropical part of Australia, it's smart to assume that anything that can and will fly at you is also capable of killing you. 
> 
> Also 'pele' is a term of endearment in Samoan, basically 'dear'. I tried checking with a mate who speaks the language if I was using the term right but he just sent me memes, so if anyone sees a mistake, as usual, my inbox is open to corrections


	8. The crew have a nice, normal, polite conversation and make level-headed decisions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: mentions of escaping an abusive relationship, child approaching adults for help, references of a child’s emotionally abusive home life, mention of child services, discussion of medical-pharmaceutical industry in exploitative terms, brief reference to a character abusing steroids, ableist dig at psychotic character, brief demonstration of emotionally abusive home life, arson.
> 
> Not a trigger warning but also important: ‘Buddicia’ is pronounced like ‘Patricia’
> 
> Suggested listening: ‘Unfinished Business’ by White Lies

They forgot the fucking comms. Should they be surprised that they forgot the comms? Not really. Juno just got the shock of his life and followed it up with a second one, if a bit less stronger, by discovering that this shock was delivered by a Martian. Jet is sleep deprived and wrestling with demons of his own that have been closer and closer to the front of his mind since he and Rita tripped flat over M’tendere. Those are some difficult things to carry into a sensitive situation, and then there was the sexy furniture and sexy people that threw Jet further off-kilter, and then a goddamned ghost came out of thin air to snog Julian and then, because apparently this disaster sundae needed another topping to finish it up, the Martian. Juno has spent a night and two days close to a Martian he did not know about. Worse than that, the Martian touched him. Worst of all, the Martian can project itself, perhaps all over the satellite.  
This place is only about 8k’s across. Is there anywhere Juno can go where he won’t feel watched? It ain’t Number 4. Juno feels watched no matter where he goes in the house. This uninterrupted, intense beam on his back or chest; a magnet drawn to its opposite through fabric. 

It’s reminding him of another time in his life where he felt that he was not safe wherever he went, and that reminder is not good for Juno’s frayed nerves, which are still exhausted from the first, protracted panic attack of the day. Juno tells himself that he is alright. Juno tells himself that he is out of Diamond’s reach and will never have to see them again. Unfortunately, his body doesn’t believe him.  
So he talks over the white-noise panic that wants to overwhelm him. In his head, he counts backwards from ten to one and then over again, and grounds himself with the thought that he’ll be home again soon- Rita, Nureyev, the other three. Familiarity, love, comfort. And Jet is here.

In a minute he’ll be over there- next door, stealing a comms, but that’s fine because if Juno needs help, he’s got a healthy pair of lungs and Jet a working pair of ears. 

He looks Nureyev-ish in his ensemble of skin-tight greys and blacks, in theory will help him blend into shadow. Does it matter if the cameras catch the seven’ four Earthling with princess hair busting into the neighbour’s house? They’re on the way out. Jet needs only to make a call and the Ruby7 will literally punch a hole through the satellite ceiling and terrorise the soccer moms and sports dads until she can find Jet.  
Honestly, the possibility of it perturbs Juno- the car raging like a rubber-suit monster in one of those classic monster movies Rita comfort-watches when she gets sick, Jet, the damsel who must placate the monster’s wrath in the rags that are strategically ripped to just-about conceal his modesty. It might be better for Jet and Juno to manage their own escape. Say, commandeer a shuttle, or steal one of the private ships that the satellite’s wealthiest dock in a floating marina, and from the stolen ship make contact: Hey, mom, the kids here are drinking Martian’s blood, can you come get me?

Before Jet heads next door, he checks in on Juno, who is recalibrating the giant hunter’s rifle that Vespa sent along with them. She seemed to think Juno would be menaced by polar bears as much as PTA-parents. 

Jet stuffs his braid down the back of his sneaky greys  
“Back in a second. If you hear laser-fire assume that I’m stunning the neighbour, unless I am gone for more than five minutes, then assume that the neighbour has stunned me and rescue me if at all possible.”

With an effort, Juno lifts the heavy gun and points its muzzle down to test the sights. It might be straight. It might be wonky as hell. “Sure. I think there’s a wheelbarrow in the garage. Jet, can you tell me if this is fucked up or not? I can’t with my depth perception.”

He obliges and handles the rifle as easily as if Juno just handed him a loaf of bread “Will you be alright?”

“I think you can leave me alone for five minutes. I’m not a five year old.”

Jet frowns and hands the rifle back “I know you have had difficulties with Martians in the past.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

Jet’s face is wry “Pakak came to me for convalescence after your…singular experience with Miasma. I do not say this to make you jealous or uncomfortable, Juno, but the reservations Pakak may hold about communicating freely with you, he does not hold with me.”

Juno nods along “It’s fine, I get it.”  
He has heard a bit about the months following Juno’s unceremonious desertion. They have found there is little value in rehashing that particular chapter of their history, but from what Juno has heard, Nureyev spent two months in a friend’s property on the verge of Cerberus, re-teaching himself to cry and consuming dangerous amounts of frozen yoghurt for a lactose intolerant person. Must have been Jet that he went to. 

“Because he wants you to think well of him. He wants to appear elegant and graceful to you- with me, he knows that ship has already sunk in port-”

“Jet, if you’re trying to cover for Peter you don’t have to. It’s fine! He can be close to people who aren’t me. Also, you’re doing a really bad job. Now, go! Go steal us a comms!”

Evidently, he has some reservations about leaving Juno to knock around here on his own for five minutes. Afraid himself, probably, that the many eyes on them will take his being alone as an opportunity to attack him.  
There is no doubt that something is coming. The Goshes have shown too much of their hand now. Whatever Julian claims about his involvement with the cult, there is no possibility that he will not tell Kayrrine’s people: he likes the patch he has carved out for himself, just as much as he enjoys having that thing pretending to be his husband whenever he gets nostalgic or, and this is horrifying to think, wants to bone down with someone who is not a client. If fake-Benten could touch Juno then Juno has no doubt that fake-Anthony can do other things for Julian.

Julian has seen what Juno Steel can do. And that was the Juno Steel of three years ago. If Julian’s got a modicum of sense in his head (Juno wants to doubt it) then he’ll have guessed, correctly, that he isn’t dealing with the same lady who managed to tank a pharmaceutical giant with one impulsive decision. This lady is far more dangerous. This lady brought back up. He’s got a rifle. Granted, even as Juno is satisfied that the rifle is balanced and will hit what he aims it at, he is not sure of what he means to do with it.  
There are murderers here. There are cruel people, abusive people, people who hurt each other and their children and who will no doubt cause this horrible pattern to be repeated across the universe if they manage the expansion they plan. But as Juno well knows, a lot of people who are cruel now were once on the receiving end of what they’re projecting. Maybe they still are. In a cult, definitely. It isn’t enough to lean into the word ‘evil’ and justify a shoot-out. It isn’t enough to point to one person as the root of ‘evil’ and forgive all the others.

The situation is too complicated for Juno to, as an outsider, point out the problems and rattle off solutions. These people need help that he cannot give. Some of them should be punished too, but he cannot decide whom that might be.  
Well, except maybe Kayrrine, and even then he’s not about to plug her between the eyes with this rifle because the woman has a kid. 

Just as Juno has put the rifle down and is congratulating himself on his magnanimity in allowing Kayrrine to live, he hears something that makes him reconsider his choice.

A small but strong voice. Piping just at the window.

“Juno Steel!” 

Juno looks through the kitchen window.

A head and a face whips into sight, then out again, then in, then out- it’s Soup Takagi jumping up and down to make herself seen over the window-box. 

Shaking with surprise, rage and some other third emotion he can’t put a word to, Juno goes to the window and rips it open. Immediately, her chubby forearms slap down on the sill. An ankle follows it. Before Juno can protest or think, the kid has hoisted herself up with a monkeyish agility and rolling herself across the kitchen sink. On instinct Juno catches her by the shoulders and prevents her from face-planting onto the tile. Seizing his arm, Soup uses him to pull the rest of her grass-stained self into his kitchen.

She is too out of breath to say what she’s bursting too. Juno is too bewildered to ask the right questions: what the hell? Where are your moms? Where’s your nanny?

She said his name

She says it again “Juno Steel.” confident and smug and scared “Juno Steel, PI, from Hyper City.”

“Close,” Juno picks her up under the arms and deposits her on the ground “Uh. Soup, what…what?”

Dusting her knees off, Soup looks up and says solemnly “My mom said she’s gonna kill you. Also your house smells funny.”

(The Carte Blanche, now)

One of the things Mag taught Nureyev was that his own body would always be among his most valuable tools and could not be neglected. However Nureyev might feel about Mag, his advice was sound, and Nureyev followed it. He’s got a black belt in a few martial arts disciplines, he can cover a kilometre in five minutes (with or without heels) and he can move himself around like an acrobat. Momentum and angles are easy to manipulate if you’ve got some basic training and enough physical strength to handle your own body-weight. However, he can understand it must have been surprising for the crew because they were not expecting it. 

Vespa, Buddy and Rita watched Nureyev bolt from the garage, grasp the chin-up bar installed in the kitchen doorway and swing himself right the fuck up into the ceiling via the mechanics’ hatch. He was gone in eight seconds. He thinks he may have damaged Buddy’s sense of reality- no one should be able to move like that.  
The Carte Blanche is a newer model, which is lucky for Nureyev. About twenty years ago ships started to be constructed with a ‘mechanic’s run’; a concession to the mechanic’s instinct to crawl into walls and take apart ceiling panelling and move about the larger vents in a ship like a possum hunting for a good nesting spot. These runs honeycomb every ship built since then and permit a mechanic to paw and nibble at every wire inch of wiring in a ship without ever setting foot on the floor. Jet is too big to get up in here, so he gives Rita a boost and relays instructions over his comms, and sometimes Nureyev, if Rita’s not on hand or if Jet just feels like hanging out but doesn’t want to say so because men in their late 30’s don’t ‘hang out’. This is how Nureyev knew which spot to swing up into.

Oh, but he is going to catch hell from his body in a few hours. Chronically ill bodies do not appreciate sudden bursts of strenuous exercise without a few warning stretches first.  
Fortunately, she recovered her calm and greeted La Charladora and her entourage as if their intrusion was an unexpected privilege rather than a big fucking problem. La Charladora has come with an entourage of seven. Modest, for her.

Less than ten minutes after they walked and wheeled through the garage, Buddy has got as many of the entourage as can fit seated about the kitchen table, given water or coffee or tea from Jet’s eclectic supply. Buddy takes her chair at the head of the table. Vespa looms behind her, doing her best to communicate both hospitality and a willingness to stab anybody that infringes upon it. Rita hangs further back with the creature, apparently Guapo, who has faced himself into a corner again. She seems uncertain of what to do and, a bit amateurishly, keeps looking up at the ceiling where she has guessed Nureyev is. She’s wrong- he’s on the other side of the room. Nureyev may be ensconced safely in the mechanic’s runs half a story over the creature, but he still doesn’t want to be over it.  
He notices a few of the entourage share his wariness of the creature. Particularly the woman using a wheelchair. She has put herself on the other extreme end of the kitchen, probably concerned that the wheezing blob of spiny flesh might take it into its head to crawl up into her lap because she is a bit closer to the ground than the others. Now there’s a terrifying thought. Nureyev files it away for later, hoping that it won’t turn up in his nightmares.

La Charladora is in no hurry to explain herself. She drinks her tea and compliments the blend. Buddy deflects by pointing out that it is Jet’s palate that she is impressed with. She remarks that she did not take Buddy and Vespa for the animal-loving type. Buddy says that she did not think of herself as an animal lover either, but sometimes you walk by the local humane society and lock eyes with an animal and feel your fate is sealed. Humane society, repeats La Charladora, and Buddy repeats it back; that’s the story she has decided to stick with.  
La Charlaroda asks what kind of breed the vent-creature is. Buddy says something vague about the horrors of puppy-farming and inbreeding. 

Finally, La Charladora concedes that her hostess is not going to indulge her, and gets to business. “I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion, Buddicia.”

Buddy’s lips stretch into a thin, chilly smile “Not at all. It is only natural that our…benefactor, would stop by to see how we’re doing. I am, perhaps, surprised that you chose to do so only a day and a half into the mission. My boys have hardly had time to unpack their bags.”

“Yes, well, about that…actually before we get into all that,” La Charladora makes an exaggerated show of glancing about the room “Where is the other one? The thief, I mean.”

Her glossy eyes slide sightlessly over the vented cover of the mechanic’s run where Nureyev happens to be crouching. The feeling is of spider’s legs brushing past him. An unseen stranger whispering foul nothings in his ear.

Buddy’s response is even “Ah. You mean Mr Ransom?”

La Charladora remains patient “Is that his name? The Rangian? Or, Ceresian? Where is he from? He must be Outer Rime.”

La Charladora waits for an answer. None come.

“Where has he got to?”

Nureyev hears Vespa’s jacket crinkle in a shrug “He comes and goes. He’s got his own agenda. Sometimes it suits him to park his fancy ass here, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not like we keep tabs on him.”

“I admit I’m curious about the man. After you mentioned you had a sixth member knocking around here, I couldn’t help but indulge that curiosity and it was the strangest thing. My people had no idea who he was. Ransom, it seems, sprang from the void, and yet he must be an accomplished career criminal to have made the cut.”

“He is.” says Buddy “More tea?”

“No, no, I’m fine, querida, thank you. Actually I was under the impression that he lodged aboard the Carte Blanche. Vespa, you say that he comes and goes, but how can that be? It’s been a while since you took on a crew, Buddy, a crew except for your wife, that is, and I know what a tight leash you like to keep on your employees.”

Nureyev can hear the smile in Buddy’s voice and cringes instinctually. He knows exactly which one it is. That pitying, shrinking smile that is more of a smirk, that gesture that makes you feel like an insect on a giant’s picnic table. “Charla, I know I’ve been rather…sedentary these past few years, but I hope you don’t imagine that I have lost so much of my craft that I’d bring a stranger aboard. A nameless stranger with no reputation nor references, and let that man sleep in the same ship as my wife every night?”

Get her, thinks Nureyev, tear her to shreds, Buddy.

La Charladora deflates “Of course not! I meant no insult.”

“None taken.” says Buddy frostily “To tell you the truth I’ve had to make a few concessions to the way I would have operated in the past. That formula is no longer the best or most effective use of my time. So it suits my needs to have a contractor, of sorts, on the team.”

A contractor? Ok, interesting direction she’s taking this lie. Nureyev wonders briefly and bitterly if she’d pull a simple ‘contractor’ into her lap every time he sat within arm’s reach on the couch. 

“I can’t pretend that it feels natural to have one of my employees far away for much of his work, but needs must. To be honest we’ve barely heard from him in the last two months. I believe the last communication we had was- Vespa, do you remember?”

Vespa doesn’t even have to think about it “A butt-dial. He’s got a pointy ass that can push buttons if he sits on his comms.” 

Nureyev stifles a laugh with his palm. He’s going to kick her as soon as he gets out of the vents. 

“I’m sure that Ransom will be quite flattered to hear that you have taken such a…determined interest, in him, when we speak next.” Buddy stirs her tea with a spoon, dragging it along the rim of the cup so the ceramic whines “Now, back to the matter at hand. What was it that you wanted to tell me about the mission, Charla?”

(The Platonium, now)

Holy fuck, kids are hard to follow when they talk. Juno forgot what it’s like to try to get a story straight out of one of them. His days of gently guiding a pre-teen witness through their statement are decades behind him. For all of old-Juno’s misfortunes and flaws, that lady had to have been a genius of patience to not only deal with kids but extract a coherent time-line from ‘em.

“-and then Mom said she was gonna call some people and get the ‘hit’ arranged, but I think she was lyin’ cos I can kinda tell when she’s trying to copy the person she’s talking to. She thinks it’s good to copy – it makes her like them and if she’s like them then they’ll be nice to her.”

“Wait, slow down. Go back to the beginning.”

“I ate some cereal for breakfast-”

“Not that far.”

The ideal situation would be to sit down, calm Soup down with some juice and take notes while she explains herself. Instead Juno is obliged to dart about the house, packing up the essentials and deciding what he’s going to have to burn to cover their tracks. Most of the house, he thinks. Been a while since he committed arson. God, when was the last time, his seventeenth birthday? He should call Mick- Mick was definitely there, whenever it was, but for some reason Mick has also been kind of aloof these past few weeks. His comms always goes to voice-mail and when he gets back to Juno, it’s always through text and even those are a bit distracted. Maybe he met a nice girl?  
Wait, Juno, don’t let your mind wander. Focus on what the kid’s saying.

“- Mom got mad ‘cos I left some of my legos out an’ the nanny stepped on one an’ Mom was like, oh, we’re gonna have to pay her medical bills now, but then she got totally distracted by the comms call, an’ that was weird ‘cos normally when Mom gets mad she doesn’t stop being mad at me ‘til she got me to fix it. She didn’t even get on me to finish cleaning up my legos.”

“And who was that call from?”

“I already told you!”

“Tell me again. Please.”

“It was from Mr Tui-Collins. I know ‘cos she said his name, like, she thought it was weird he was talking to her ‘cos they’re not really, really friends. What’s this?”

Soup has picked up a knife sheathed knife the size of Juno’s forearm. She traces her grubby fingers over the intricately embroidered designs along its flat side; a white bear, the black fin of some sea animal moving through water, half of a symbol Juno doesn’t know.

Gingerly, he takes it from her “That’s a knife.”

“Is it your husband’s?”

Juno puts the knife in the back of his belt, hoping that it won’t somehow wriggle out of its sheath and cut him a new butt-crack “Yeah. Except-”

“He’s not really your husband. Your house smells funny.” Soup follows him out of the living room and into the bathroom.

“You already said that. I know. Just don’t breathe in too deep, ok?” Juno grabs their toothbrushes and tosses them onto a pile of similar objects in the living room. 

“I kinda know about you,” she continues “I’m not allowed to watch any streams except for the news and you were on the news like, a year ago, I remember because they didn’t have a photo of your face an’ I thought that was weird. Who do you have to be to not have a photo of your face out there, you know? An’ they were talking about how you’d disappeared from Mars an’ how some people thought you’d left ‘cos the old Mayor died. The new Mayor was talkin’ about it last night on the news. Who is he?”

New Mayor? What the hell is she talking about? Kid stuff, probably. She must have misunderstood who the provisional government’s representative is.

“He’s a friend. We work together. Ok, so what did your mom say about me that makes you think that she’s going to have me killed?”

Soup rolls her eyes “She said that! She said ‘I’ll put a hit out’ to cousin Min an’ then she hung up the phone and started yellin’ out the window for Jiorjah. What’s this wet stuff on the floor?”

Juno falters “Cousin Min? M-I-N or M-I-H-N?”

“I dunno. M-I-N I think. Why?”

It’s a common name. It could be a coincidence.

Juno crouches to Soup’s level “Your last name is Takagi, right? Can you tell me some of the other last names in your family?”

She pulls a face “You’re a detective. Guess.”

Ok, that was funny, but if he laughs it’s just going to encourage sass and make this whole thing more painful than it already is “That’s not how it works-”

“Maybe you’re bad at your job.”

“Is her name Kanagawa?”

Soup’s eyes brighten “Yeah! I thought you said that’s not how it works-”

“Soup, this is really important. I need you to tell me just this. No jokes, no funny answers, uh, your cousin Min, did she get married to a man named Croesus? And did that man have two kids, named Cecil and Cassandra?”

“Uh-huh. It was before I was born but I saw the photos. Mom was in the wedding. Mama too, even though they weren’t married yet. Mom got to bring Mama as her date and then she proposed while they were dancing. What’s this stuff on the floor?”

Oh, of course Kayrrine proposed at someone else’s wedding. Sham, business-wedding of a murderous family member or no, that’s got to be the worst thing you can do at a wedding. At least, this explains where the funding for the Wellness Centre has come from. Juno gets the feeling that he and Jet have just tripped over the tip of a conspiracy-iceberg that they are not remotely equipped to tackle on their own.

“Ok. Huh. Soup, you need to go home now. Also, stop stepping on it.”

Several emotions flash across her face. None of them are positive.

She shakes her head. Juno’s heart sinks. He could have guessed this was coming.

“Why don’t you want to go home?”

“Because. Mom said she was gonna kill you. If I’m here I can tell her not to.”

Juno stands up and backs out of the bathroom, towards the front door “That’s not going to work. It’s a kind thought, though, so thank you. Why do you really not want to go home?”

“My parents are mean. They’re always talking to me like I’m stupid.”

With a pang, Juno remembers the way that Kayrrine talked to her kid in the car this morning. Yeah. That wasn’t good or constructive. If she talks that way in public, the way she talks to Soup in private has got to be…

“Ok, Soup, you don’t have to go home. Is there somewhere in your neighbourhood that you can go? Like, a place for kids who don’t want to go home? Can you go in and ask for help?”

She thinks for a moment, then shakes her head “We don’t have places like that on The Platonium. We’re not supposed to have problems.”

“What about the rest of your family?”

Soup counts them off on her fingers “Mama doesn’t talk to her family anymore. Those are the Takagis. They didn’t like Mom, so, yeah, an’ then there’s the Kanagawa side. And that’s it.”

Neither one is promising. But Juno can’t stomach the thought of sending a kid home when she has just blatantly asked for help. There were times when he and Benten were younger, they asked in different ways. Never so directly. But never in a way that could be mistaken for kids fucking around or throwing an tantrum. They needed help and no one stepped up in a meaningful way, and now Benten is dead.

How long has it been? Six minutes? Juno has to check on Jet soon, if not right now.

“What about your nanny, Soup? If I send you over to your nanny’s can you stay there until I can call someone who will help you?”

She shakes her head, growing scared or frantic “Mom’ll just come and get me! She gets mad when she can tell that I’m upset! I’m not allowed to cry at home, you know. I’m not allowed to be mad or tell her she’s being mean. Neither Mom or Mama let me say that. I don’t wanna- please don’t make me go back to them. Don’t put me where they can get me.”

“Ok. I won’t. Uh, what about the police? Can I call the police?”

Soup’s eyes grow wet “Mom’s friends with the police. They’ll just give me back.”

This may require outside help. God, who do you even call for this kind of stuff? Is there an interplanetary service? Does he have to call Child Services for the nearest planet or lunaroid? Shit, where is Jet? Jet knows how to do things. 

“Ok, Soup, I promise I’m not going to just give you back to your moms. I promise. So I need you to help me make that happen. Can you sit down there and, just, wait, while I go find my friend? He might need my help.”

Soup trudges over to the chair and slumps into it “Mrs Steel?”

“You can just call me Juno.”

“Ok. Juno, if you’re tricking me and you bring me to my moms, I’m gonna find a way to haunt you without dying.”

“Fair enough!”

Juno fears the worst as he goes out into the backyard. He imagines Jet laying on the neighbour’s floor in an expanding pool of blood, or shot and still at gunpoint while the neighbour summons Kayrrine’s people, or- wait, here he comes over the fence.

Juno can already tell by his expression that the comms aren’t working.

“I have tried six of Buddy’s seven burner comms. I even tried Pakak’s personal comms. Not one of them got to the point of ringing. Our out-going calls are being blocked and I don’t know that we have enough time for me to figure out a way around it.”

Opening the door for him, Juno grabs his arm to slow him “We’ve got another problem.”

Jet’s eyes roll almost into the back of his head “Of course we do. What’s happened? Is the Martian in the living room?”

“Kayrrine’s kid is.”

In fact Soup can be seen from where they’re standing- she’s craned her neck into the hallway, keeping a foot stuck back onto the cushions so Juno cannot claim she left the chair. 

“Why is she here?”

“She needs help.” Juno lowers his voice “I think her home isn’t safe for her. And since her mother controls a lot of The Platonium, I think it isn’t either. She’s asking for help from the only people she thinks can help. We might have to bring her with us. Drop her off on the planet, somewhere she can get help from qualified people.”

A little sigh. Jet tosses the useless comms over his shoulder and into the grass “Well, we’re going to have to hijack a vehicle. I am not sure about how a child would fit into that equation.”

“Yeah, I don’t feel great about this either. I’m not sure what the hell else we should do, though. I can’t leave a kid in the lurch.”

Jet puts a hand in the small of his back “Nor would I ask you to. We will figure it out.”

“Are you talking about me?” shouts Soup. Then, as Jet tugs his braid out from the back of his shirt “Oh my God, you have so much hair! Your hair is taller than me! Who are you?”

“Jet Sikuliaq.”

“I saw your stream. I know the password for the child-block. Where’s your car? The red one.”

“The Ruby7 is green. Juno, are we ready to go?”

Soup laughs “That’s stupid.”

“I didn’t name the ship. It was Soup, wasn’t it? Are you sure about this?”

She takes her foot off the chair and, for some reason, stays on one leg as she hops over to them “Sure about what? Running away from home?”

“To be clear, it isn’t fun and games.” Jet takes a bag from Juno, trusting that Juno remembered to pack his reading glasses and medication.

“Home isn’t either. It’s just where I live an’ I wanna live somewhere else, where people are actually glad to see me when I get there instead ‘a just waiting for me to go away. I’m not stupid. I know you’re not supposed to leave home when you’re eight, but I also know that your parents are supposed to be…parents. An’ they had their chance an’ I don’t wanna see ‘em anymore.”

Tears prick the back of Juno’s eye. He digs his fingers into his palm. How can she smile when she says that? How has she found the strength to act on the fantasy that all kids from broken or abusive homes have, that Juno entertained every day up until Mick and Sasha taught him how to make himself scarce from Sarah’s warpath? To reach out and grab onto someone strong and safe, to say ‘help me’ and not take no for an answer.  
Kids are hard to follow. 

“You won’t have to.” says Juno. He wants to believe himself. 

“On that note,” Jet hands the kid his personal comms and a chunky pair of over-the-ear headphones (normal earpieces are too little for him) “Here. When things start to get, uh, unpleasant, plug yourself into that.”

Soup immediately finds his music “How come your playlists are just named numbers?”

Whatever excuse Jet has is forgotten as the one voice Juno does not want to hear right now pierces through the hall.

“Hello!”

“Ah, shit.” Juno plunges his hand into a pocket and quickly tucks the object he needs under his eyepatch. 

“Hello!” Kayrrine is coming closer.

Soup’s face falls. Her shoulders slump. She is thinking that it’s over. She has been caught before she can even begin to run away properly.

The letter-box flaps open. Kayrrine’s bright eyes peer through. Her voice is high and cheerful as she says “Yoo-hoo! Juno Steel! Jet Sikuliaq! Would you two be absolute dolls and come out with your hands up?”

(The Carte Blanche, now)

“Your boys really needn’t have gone to The Platonium.”

From this angle, Nureyev cannot see Buddy’s face. He does not have to see her to know that the shock must be plain on her face.

Enjoying her advantage, La Charladora meanders in her explanation “One of my nephews realised that there had been a clever bit of encryption work done on the packet that was sent to us. Your people must have missed it. He managed to crack it and unearth a rather interesting kernel-”

“The heck there was!” snaps Rita.

It sounds like Vespa’s trying to hush her up, but Rita won’t be silenced.

“The heck there was encryption! Pardon me for saying so, lady, but you’re lyin’! Or the bobo that says they found it is lyin’, cos there weren’t no hidden nothin’ on the data packet I got! I ran that thing through every decryption key there is! I went over them code lines with a microscope an’ there ain’t a bit of it that I didn’t check for hidden stuff! Who the heck do you think I am, lady? What kind of punk-ass, credit-card stealin’ IT-major do you take me for? An’ what kinda trick are you tryin’ to pull on us, huh?”

La Charladora flusters, offended “How dare you speak to me like that? ‘Trick’? What are you implying?”

A gruff voice, one of the entourage, mumbles something at Rita, which she takes no notice of. Rita raising her voice has also agitated Guapo, who turns small circles in his corners like a dog laying down to sleep. 

“I ain’t implyin’, I’m tellin’! Whatever you’re about to try ta pass off as a,” here, her voice becomes jowly in mockery “ ‘kernel we unearthed’ you already knew or you just got told! So don’t even try ta lie to me, lady!”

The silence that falls afterwards is thick and heavy except for Guapo’s wheezing. Nureyev has covered his mouth again; he cannot believe the gall of Rita. That is the benefit of coming into this situation as an outsider, he guesses, that Rita’s got awareness over investment in this criminal network, so she doesn’t care who she rubs the wrong way as long as the job gets done. 

Buddy, ever the diplomat, is the first to find her voice again “I think you had better tell us what you… ‘discovered’.”

La Charladora’s tone has changed. She is no longer playing with them “The source of the cure-mother prime is…well, there’s no way to say this without sounding like a crackpot- no offence Vespa-”

“Aw, screw off!” Rita shrills.

“It’s Martian blood.”

Nureyev’s blood chills. He shuts his eyes. The smell of the tomb, the feel of the damp flesh around his throat comes back to him, and Juno, on the other side of a heavy door.  
And he makes a decision he hopes he won’t regret. 

(Still the Carte Blanche, still now)

Vespa is laughing. Vespa is doubled over on the back of Buddy’s chair, laughing into her elbow until it changes to coughing.

“Oh, wow. You all heard that, right?” she manages between coughs “Oh, shit. Shit. Martian’s blood? Rita, Buddy, you heard- ok! Ok, ok, that’s ok.”

Standing, Buddy lays a hand on Vespa’s arm “Are you alright?”

“I will be. Shit.” shaking her head, Vespa stoops and summons Guapo with a click of her tongue “Might as well be fucking Martian’s blood. Come here, boy.”

Rita is shaken. Mad, still, but on edge “Ain’t nobody gonna say the obvious thing? Martians ain’t real.”

For the first time one of the entourage speaks up. The one at La Charladora’s elbow. Their size is almost Earthling except there are a few tells that they are doping- veins that stand out close to their throat and their rouged-corpse pallor.  
“They are.”

“No they ain’t.”

“Yes they are,” the quasi-Earthling turns to La Charladora “Tia, there’s no point in talking to these people.”

“Relax, I haven’t gotten to the point yet. Give them time to process. Here.” she drops an expensive comms into their hand “Go into the garage and call Té. Tell them to tell their boss that the information has been passed along.”

“Ah, so that’s what this is. Someone bought you.”

La Charladora scowls “I’m always bought, Buddicia. Plans have changed. I want you to call your boys back.”

The doper seems to be on a trajectory to pass a lot closer to Buddy than is polite or necessary, but is cut off by Guapo’s waddling girth

Buddy hums. Her eyes stray to the ceiling for an instant, then return to La Charladora’s face “May I ask why?”

“This is the long and short of it, Buddy. You’re to bring your boys back and stop this whole thing. Stop looking for the cure-mother prime. It doesn’t need to be found.”

“Oh?” Buddy glances at Vespa “We’re to stop, are we? On whose authority?”

La Charlardora’s smile is sickly and sweet “You met with Rauho today, didn’t you? And you didn’t expect to. Why do you think Rauho would go through the trouble of meeting you in person if not to, well, make you aware of the kind of investment that we all have in this project of yours. You remember, of course, that you are not the only one of us to take an interest in the cure-mother and what it can do for us.”

“Heal the sick?” Vespa offers, crouching to scratch Guapo’s chin “Rescue people from decades of medical debt slavery?”

“Yes. Not to mention the financial benefits for whomever brings the cure-mother to the market. I was not so educated in the way that the cure-mother prime works when I passed the packet onto you. Now that people have reached out and explained it to me, I can assure you there is no need to search for the cure-mother prime. We know where it is. We know what it is. We are perfectly happy with the way it is being managed and what is planned for it in the future. That’s another thing we should talk about, Buddicia. There are some exciting ideas for how the cure-mother should be put to use for the benefit of the common people, but I’m sure you can agree that it must be controlled.”

Buddy raises an eyebrow “Must it?”

“Of course. Look, vaccines aren’t free either, are they? Insulin isn’t free. Blood transfusions aren’t free. Why should the most lucrative, versatile product of all time be free?”

“Product.” echoes Buddy.

“Yes, product. Had I known when I was organising this mission what I now know, I would have used more careful words to make sure that we were on the same page.”

“Oooh, I got some careful words for you, lady-” Rita stops as Buddy puts an arm out in front of her.

“You’re welcome to buy in if you want to, but if not then I think it best that you leave well enough alone. Find another quest to champion.”

“A quest?” Buddy lays her cup of tea to the side, and wraps an arm about Rita’s shoulder. Possibly to comfort her, possibly to hold her back from smacking La Charladora in the mouth as she clearly longs to “A quest is a rather reductive way of looking at it.”

“What would you call it?”

“Righting a profound wrong.”

“Oh, don’t be so righteous. It doesn’t suit you.”

“I believe I know myself well enough to decide what becomes me and what does not. If that was all, Charla, can I show you the door?”

Slowly, La Charladora stands “You may, yes. I hope this is the last time we have to talk about what suits you and what doesn’t.”

“Buddy looks good in everything.” says Vespa. 

Then, as if in agreement, the Ruby7 fires up in the garage. The unmistakable whistling roar of her engine bounces off the walls. 

Several of the entourage spring up at the same time and rush for the garage- a lot of beefy frames getting stuck in the narrow doorways. That gives Peter enough time to shut the garage door in their face. The sucking sound of the room sealing off, of the room preparing to open onto the vacuum of space, and a few urgent revs of the car’s engine. The doper beats uselessly on the door. All of them can make out a voice, indistinct in words but clear in its intent: get away, get away, get away.

Then the ship shudders. The Ruby7 streaks past the windows. Her driver is no more than a smudged silhouette behind the wheel. 

La Charladora watches the car spiral out into the stars “Who the devil was that?”

Buddy has grown very interested in the quick of her nails “Hum. I suppose Ransom must have been home after all. I wouldn’t worry about it, darling, I’m sure he just overheard us and decided he’d be helpful by fetching our other two.”

“Esteban!” she shouts to the man she sent off earlier “Change of plans! Tell Té to tell their boss we’re going to need a hand with The Platonium. Buddicia has decided not to behave herself.”

“I would like you to leave my ship now.”

“I’m not going anywhere until I’m sure you won’t put your radiation-eaten nose into this-”

Vespa whips a knife out of some unseen sheath and makes a noise that alarms Guapo.

Buddy draws a gun from her own bosom- which explains why her left breast had a right angle “Rita, take cover.” 

(The Platonium, now)

Juno goes out first. His hands are up to show that he has no weapons and no plans to reach backwards for the bag on his shoulder. Jet comes out second. Soup is his tiny shadow. She shies behind his legs and does not meet her mother’s eyes.  
Hopefully that means she is not really aware of how many people are on the lawn right now, and the amount of guns they have brought with them. Heavy tactical shit that the average civilian has never laid eyes on before let alone been trained to use. The kind of stuff that a privately funded militia might have left over at the end of a war, that their benefactor might pass onto the next batch of people recruited for their next malicious project. A bunch of pretty faces glaring at Juno with a uniform mixture of hate and disgust. Kayrrine is at the head of them flanked by Nadeing and Jiorjah. The optimist in Juno searches their faces for a trace of shame, and is disappointed.

Kayrrine is not surprised to see her kid there. Just mad.

“Tsuper-Tsonic, come here. Right now.”

“Nu-uh.” Soup mutters into Jet’s calf.

“Yes-huh. Come here. Those are dangerous criminals.”

“So’re you.”

“What did you say? Speak up, and come over here. Don’t play around. This is serious. You’re going to be grounded already. Don’t make it worse by disobeying me right now.”

Jiorjah has got their baby-monitor out. Without raising their head, they say “Come on. Listen to your mom, kid. We don’t have time for this.”

Stooping, Jet turns and says something to Soup that is too quiet to be heard. She listens with a grim face and shuffles out from behind him, past Juno, to her mother’s side. Soup looks back at Juno and mouths ‘haunt you’ just as her nanny pushes past the ranks of armed soccer-parents and bundles her off. A piece of Juno goes with her- he failed her already. They haven’t even stepped off of Number 4 and Juno already fucked it up.  
Except no, he didn’t, it is Jet who just let her go and if Jet did that he must also be sure that they can get her back and fulfil their promise, and anyway it’s better that Soup not see what Juno’s about to do.

Kayrrine is talking. 

Juno pretends to listen, pretends to cough as if on the verge of a panic attack and raises his hands to his eyepatch. He slips the lighter out from under the patch and turns into Jet like he’s shrinking into his friend for comfort.  
Kayrrine is still talking. 

For once in his life, Juno gets the flame up on the first click. Slipping his arm under Jet’s, Juno lobs the lighter as hard as he can, praying that he still retains some of the skills of his childhood hobby of throwing bricks through police-station windows. 

The lighter lands and skids a few feet into the hall. The flame makes an orange Catherine Wheel across the carpet. It catches. That funny smell that Soup complained of becomes stronger in a wave as the fire leaps onto the gasoline and races up the tracks that Juno sloshed into every room.

Only then does he tune into what Kayrrine’s saying.

“-the fuck did you do?”

Hope she wasn’t talking at him the whole time. He’ll have to ask Jet for a summary.

“What is wrong with you?” her manicured hands knot in her shiny hair “Why would you do that! The police- Jiorjah, let someone know we need fire and police down here, right now!”

As the flames roar and the heat swells at his back Juno laughs “There goes the neighbourhood!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Juno that's not good fire safety.


	9. Annual convening of the dead brothers' society, featuring a special guest-speaker.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok so there’s a lot going on in terms of trigger warnings in this chapter. This is where we’d be earning our graphic descriptions of violence warning if I’d used archive warnings in the summary. For people who don’t need the trigger tags as much, here’s a general trigger tag. Below it is a way more in-depth one where I tagged everything I could think of that happens to our characters. Take care of yourselves
> 
> General triggers: death, violence, gore, body horror, child in danger, emotionally abusive parent-child relationship
> 
> More specific triggers: mentions of illness in infancy, loss of sibling, non-graphic mention of death by industrial accident, funeral, mentions of medicinal tattooing specific to Northern Arctic Inuk traditions, references to the possibility of being spiritually possessed, character with fear of blood forced to look at blood, manipulation, torture with knives, description of ableism in parenting, implication of an alcoholic parent, graphic descriptions of knife wounds, child near to/aware of violence, body horror to do with spontaneous change, parent abandoning child in danger, 
> 
> Suggested listening: Pink Floyd, ‘Wish you were here’

(Utqiagvik, a long time ago)

The four Sikuliaq siblings in order: YJ, Emanoraq, Arcady and the late arrival, Jetffrey. In the ten years between him and Arcady his parents did not plan to make an even number but are delighted to have him anyway. He means to come out on Samhain’s night, but his mother is too staunch a Catholic to let that happen, so holds on until a minute into the midnight of November 1st. Jet comes into the world pulling a face like a hipster that just found a beard-hair in his microbrew. His father bursts out laughing. Even the midwife is so moved by his expression that she nearly fumbles and drops him beneath the birthing stool. Their mirth dies down as they realise how small Jet is. 

They are right to worry: for the first couple of months his health is shaky, its symptoms close to the nameless and chronic sickliness that affects about a tenth of all children born to Utqiagvik or to its locals living abroad. For a while people were worried it had something to do with the space-port parked on the land beyond the Istakoak Lagoon- as one of the few ports that stayed open, it dealt with about 1/8th of Earth’s total travel traffic. Although this was supposedly the time after Earthlings stopped leaving and Spacers stopped coming, it was still in use every day.  
There was cautious talk of moving the port down between the other lake and Nunavak bay, which would have meant disturbing the sea-dwellers a bit more than anybody wanted. But by the time Jet came around, the college figured it out: something in the groundwater. A left-over from the days before the crude oil giants were kicked out, when they could pollute and murder with impunity. Old sins making themselves known in the generations that come after. The only cure was to move away and hope for the best. At least it wasn’t fatal.

Whatever is wrong with him, Jet cries like a colicky baby and will not stop until he is carried. As the eldest of the four it falls to YJ to carry him when their parents are at work or otherwise unavailable. He puts Jet in an amauti and gets used to having a little face forever peering through his elbow or over his shoulder. YJ writes his term papers with Jet bouncing on his knee. He is ribbed by his friends for whipping Jet’s photo from his wallet each time he talks to someone new at a party. It becomes unusual to see YJ out and about in town without Jet hanging off of his back or arm, or famously and to their parents’ horror, tucked into the front of YJ’s windbreaker so his hands are free to steer the handlebars of his motorbike.  
When Jet starts to talk, he talks mostly to YJ, or about YJ when he isn’t on hand. By then, his health is improving. He is still a bit undersized, but he breathes fine, he sleeps through the night, eats well and deals with common colds as well as a toddler can be expected to. His mother wonders if Jet’s problems weren’t down to the fact that Jet was so damned mad when he came out- maybe a bit of vengeance against the people who thought they’d be smartasses and evict him from his nice warm womb.

When Jet is old enough to crawl and walk, YJ has to be careful not to step on Jet when he invariably follows. Their sisters play a game where they pick Jet up and carry him to a random room in the house, then bet snacks on how long it will take him to be back to distressing the seams of YJ’s jeans.  
Each time they are separated for school (college and pre-school respectively), Jet has to recover with a five-minute sulk before he can go about his toddler business. The closeness of the brothers is such that their parents are almost alarmed, or perhaps, jealous. What will Jet do when YJ graduates and moves on with his life? YJ’s been planning a motorbike exploration of Turtle Island since before Jet was born. Jet can’t be taken along for that- no, YJ, he can’t, and if you try to talk your father and I into it one more time I’m gonna put your head in a snow-well.

His father cannot help but tease Jet a little bit, asking him whom of his family he loves the most, even though it’s silly to pick favourites.

Jet only needs a second to consider this “I love me the most.”

As it turns out, his parents needn’t have worried. YJ leaves. Jet cries. They both cry, actually, but it’s harder to tell with YJ because of his tinted helmet.  
Then Jet grows up a little bit. His horizons expand to include his sisters. Emanoraq has an apprenticeship under one of the better makers of analogue hunting equipment in the area, and so when she practices, she has to bring a spare pair of safety glasses so Jet doesn’t get blinded by stray splinters. Every time Arcady sits down to paint her nails, she is obliged to do his too and keep him abreast of everything happening at school and the sewing club, where she and the other kids are learning to stitch seal-skin and other hides. It is from Arcady that Jet develops an interest in embroidery. 

By the time YJ comes back almost a year and a half later, peeling from the prairie suns and pickled in Atlantic salt, Jet is different. Their old, easy comeraderie is no longer so powerfully, mutually felt; Jet wonders why a brother sixteen years his senior still wants to hang around him so much.

“Because you’re my favourite little man in the all the worlds. When you’re old enough, we can do the Turtle Island trip again. Together this time. I can show you some of the places I went to and we can see new places together.”

Jet’s answer is usually a grunt because there is something immediately more interesting in front of him- an embroidery hoop, for example, or a kid from that he absolutely has to throw a snowball at.

YJ is patient. He understands that his brother is growing, though he cannot help lament “You know you used to follow me everywhere. When you were just learning to walk, every time I was around you’d pretend you couldn’t so I had to carry you. If I was so much as making a cup of coffee you had to watch it and ask me all about it.”

Jet does not look up from his hoop “I also used to shit my pants.”

“I know, I know. You grew up! I’ll just wait until you get to the age when hanging out with your brother becomes cool again. And don’t say ‘shit’, Jet. It’s crass as fuck.”

Jet has not yet reached the age of reunion that YJ predicts when they lose him. His loss is unexpected and fast, so there is no time to prepare Jet for human mortality. He knows the theory of death as it applies to old pets and prey-animals, but no one had taken him to the side and explained that it was also relevant to his brother.

Earth, the originator of all the surviving life in its solar system, is alienated from its descendants. There is almost no meaningful communication with other planets as an administrative entity. What global government does exist is usually turned against its visitors instead of welcoming them- but then, most of the people who visit do not come just to take in the sights or visit an Earthling penpal. Most of them are here to try to re-establish the industrialism on Earth that rules the rest of the solar system.  
Why shouldn’t they? What is Earth but a doddering grandparent who should have had the decency to die centuries ago? Her people are mysterious and monstrous whether at home or out amongst the rest of the galaxy. An Earthling’s only intrinsic value is as an object of voyeurism: charming and backwards because they use analogue tools and some of them still hunt like, actual animals, and most of them don’t ever get into space-ships unless it’s for the blink-and-you-miss-it trip to the lone Earthling moon.

It is with these ideas about Earth that industry comes to Utqiagvik again. The people do not know to expect it or watch for it. Once, this part of Nunavut was drilled and fished and whaled. The company that happened to make a little progress in Utqiagvik was of a Brahmese extraction and were used to piling up the waste from smelting processes wherever the hell they wanted to. One of those sites just happened to be near to a branch of Utqiagvik’s branch of the Penumbra network. YJ was in the middle of a midday commute for his shift at the wildlife hospital when the slag slipped.  
Fifteen people were smothered. While YJ died on the way to the hospital, Jet sat in his History lesson with a nauseous cramp in his gut and the inexplicable certainty that a part of him had just been torn away. 

YJ is buried in a chapel that hunkers against the sea winds. The ground is summer-soft and accepts him greedily. Jet spends most of the funeral tucked under Emanoraq’s arm. He is still under-sized, on the cusp of a puberty that will give him the height and dimensions that are common among his siblings. But for now he is short and thin and could be the corpse itself, fugitive from its coffin, attempting to blend in with the living. 

He is far away from what’s happening. Jet’s eyes are on the nearby rocky beach and the pod of whales that have come into the bay to teach their babies how to breach and play. Where do they put their dead? Whales, all types of them, they’re smart. Sapient. What can you do, though, when you’re a sea creature and your partner or sibling or friend’s corpse has washed ashore? You have to let the humans pick over it. If not then the corpse becomes heavier than the water and sinks to the bottom as humus, to feed the world that crawls across the ocean floor. At least the Sikuliaqs can put a marker over their dead.  
Jet wonders if you can cry when you’re underwater for most of your life. He is thirteen, then. In just over three years, he will become one of the most feared criminals in the galaxy. But for now, he is thirteen, and he is letting go of his big sister’s hand at the funeral, saying he will be back for the wake, that he just wants to take a break on the beach and watch the whales play. 

(Now)

Twenty-five years later and it has come to this: a basement in a cult compound, a chair that doesn’t quite fit him, a gun to Juno Steel’s forehead.  
Whose fault is this? Jet doesn’t know. It is possible that the fault belongs to no one. This is just the natural conclusion to the domino effect of his and Juno’s and Kayrrine’s and the rest’s independent choices. That conclusion is not nearly so satisfying, however, as having a clear target for the blame would be: here, Jetffrey, punch this man and this woman and everything will be better.

It’s that kind of bull-headed stubbornness that got him into his criminal career in the first place. These people, he is sure, are victims in their own ways. Abuse is cyclical. But that kind of empathy is hard to hold onto when the potential victim abusers have just bundled you into a dank, occasionally Martian haunted basement and lashed you to a chair.

But, Jetffrey, it is important to breathe. Stay calm. Be stoic. Protect Juno. Get the kid out, too.

Oh, and try to look a little more wounded.

Jet has no idea what Nadeing hopes to achieve with this ‘beating’. So far he has been a model hostage. He got into the car as commanded, he went into the Wellness Centre, he let them cuff him (which cut into his wrists because their widest setting is still a bit too small), he let them frogmarch him and Juno into the basement and tie them up like a pair of drug-lords in a competitor’s dungeon, and he did all of this without complaint. Yet, following some invisible signal given by Kayrrine, Nadeing started hitting him.  
She punches like a grade-schooler- and not a tough one, either. The fact that she punches at all is a tell, when anybody who’s put in real fighting hours knows you should just use a tool. Faces are thin organs that pad the skull, which is one of the hardest bones in the body and so logically choosing to hit that with the knuckles, the bone with the structural integrity most like uncooked spaghetti, is not a good option. 

Nadeing must take her cues from streams. Each time she draws back her hand to hit him again her face is contorted with more pain. Her knuckles are going to bruise and swell her fingers up to the size of sausages. Jet, for his part, has to make a conscious effort to turn his head with each blow. Better that she isn’t clued in to how little effect this is having on him. Let the cultists think he is more worn down than he really is, so when the chance to escape comes up they will be less prepared for his attempt.

The energy in the basement is awkward, from Jet’s perspective. Awkward in that very specific way of, say, having to build flat-pack furniture with inscrutable instructions and one shitty multi-wrench. No one really knows what they are doing but to admit that would be tantamount to failure, and the goddamned bookshelf needs to get up somehow. He cannot see much of what’s going on as his hair is falling into his face and he is obliged to whip his head from side-to-side. As far as he can tell, the majority of the small army that escorted them here stayed upstairs. It looks like Kayrrine and her two lieutenants are the only ones who have come down here.  
The other one, the one that Jet is worried about, Jiorjah, has got a gun pointed lazily at Juno’s temple, which is one of the only reasons Jet hasn’t torn his cuffs and put Nadeing’s head through the cement ceiling. Other reasons being that it’s better not to start splitting lips until he knows a bit more about what that might cause the Martian to do in retaliation.

At last, Kayrrine breaks her silence “That’s enough, Nadeing.” 

Jet lets his head loll. No doubt this little performance will have aggravated old whiplash injuries. Having to hold his spine so straight has been bad enough, but he cannot slump or his back-up plan might be discovered and confiscated.  
The real pain will come tomorrow on waking up. He may as well just go to bed with a neck brace on.

Nadeing is on the verge of tears, cradles one hand after the other. Her lips are getting raw from biting back groans of pain. 

Juno, who stayed silent during the beating probably because he could see Jet putting in double the effort of Nadeing to make it look good, finally speaks up “What the fuck was that supposed to achieve?”

“You shut up, you fucking child-thief.” snaps Kayrrine.

Whatever confidence she felt about this situation melted away the minute she shut the door on the rest of her militia. If Nadeing is a bit out of her depth, then Kayrrine is about to walk straight off the continental shelf. She has no idea what she is doing but ploughs ahead, which has lead Jet to the conclusion that Kayrrine is waiting on someone. Those that funded this and provided those weapons. Juno tried to whisper something to him in the car- about the benefactors, he thinks, but Jiorjah noticed and threatened to hold him in a headlock if he did it again. 

Kayrrine stands over him “Who sent you?”

Jet blows some hair from his eye. It settles over his other eye “What?”

“I said, who sent you?”

“I can’t hear you.”

Kayrrine looks at Juno “Has he got hearing loss?”

Bunched up and craning away from Jiorjah’s gun, Juno shakes his head “He didn’t when we got down here! What’s wrong with you people? You spent ten minutes hitting a man in the face and then wonder why he can’t answer your questions?”

Holstering their gun on their hip, Jiorjah laughs, beckoning Kayrrine “Here, let me.”

Kayrrine’s cheeks colour “I can do this.”

“Sure, but I want this to get done today. Come on. This is my job.”

So that’s what was off about them. Jiorjah seemed rootless in this community, without a partner or children to anchor them here, nor a job, nor any friendships that were not born out of the necessity of belonging to the same cult. Jet spoke with them for a few minutes at that long-ago party and knew that he did not like them. They had an air of sinister competence that was absent from the others. They carried themselves with a self-assured confidence that Jet has only ever seen in other people who know how to fight, and to win when they do. Jiorjah is as Jet feared; trained.  
Only a few times in his life has he come across trained torturers. Most of them died in the war or, afterwards, killed themselves. Sometimes the solar government and Dark Matters got rid of them too. Torturers are on hand when privileged information gets spilled. They must be freshly trained or exceptionally numbed to the horror of their job. 

Turning a deeper red, Kayrrine steps back and hovers beside Juno. She takes no notice of him craning so far out of his chair that he’s on the verge of falling over. Nadeing excuses herself upstairs quietly, her hands limp at her sides. A shaft of light falls down the stairs. A shadow darts away from the top of the stairs abruptly, but not abruptly enough to save herself from a scolding.

“Girl, I swear to God! Get out of here!”

The door shuts and traps them in dimness once more. 

Jiorjah begins to roll up his sleeves, unbuttoning the top of his shirt with clinical disinterest. Jet holds himself straight in his chair. Let them interpret it as Earthling machismo. Whatever they want to think, so long as they don’t think to search him or Juno. He can only thank God or whoever’s up there that Juno’s laser-rifle is Spacer sized. An Earthling equivalent wouldn’t cleave to his spine like this one, would be so obvious a shape in his clothes that even he’d laugh at himself for the attempt at hiding it. 

A knife slides slowly from the back of their jeans- Jet isn’t the only one with a weapon tucked in his belt today. His is bigger, though.

Jiorjah positions the knife above Jet’s left wrist. Juno’s eye widens.

“Wait-”

In a few frighteningly deft movements Jiorjah has cut away Jet’s sleeve up to the shoulder “Don’t rush me. We’ll get to the good part in due time…they make you people strong, don’t they? What’s this code, here?”

They have discovered one of Jet’s medicinal tattoos. The one on the inside of his elbow, specifically, over the joint. Age-blued and losing its definition like a lot of stick-poke tattoos do. In Jet’s opinion it still works. 

They take their knife by the tip and trace the hilt along the ridges of the tattoo “What does it mean?”

“It means I was a sick child. My parents had me tattooed as a pre-teen to keep my health from failing again.”

“Hm.” Jiorjah moves his other sleeve up and touches the hilt to the mark they find in the valley of his clavicle “And what’s this?”

“Another tattoo, believe it or not.”

Over their shoulder, Jet catches Juno’s eye. For all the time he and Juno have spent together and in close quarters, Juno knows relatively little about him. Especially in comparison to the amount that Jet knows about Juno. It seems an unfair advantage.

“Where I come from…if someone works with the dead, in a place that poses spiritual dangers, they might get tattooed on their joints. It prevents the angry or evil spirits of recent dead or older dead from getting into you. Something went wrong with me. I hosted an evil for many years, and when I began to work to expunge it and its worst impulses…I thought if nothing else that getting these tattoos would remind me of my commitment to being better.”

“Did it work?”

Juno holds his eyes.

Jiorjah seizes Jet by the chin and makes him face them “Look at me when I talk to you. Did it work?”

“Most of the time.”

They narrow their eyes “What does that mean?”

Jet meets their eyes “Perhaps you should discover that for yourself. You are an interrogator, aren’t you? Far be it from me to deprive you of a chance to practice your craft.”

“Jesus, Jet.” mutters Juno “Don’t bait ‘em.”

“Speaking of bait, I think I’ve kept you waiting long enough Mr Steel. Or is it Mrs? Are you two actually married?”

Juno squares his jaw and says nothing.

This only encourages Jiorjah- with Kayrrine apparently paralysed by the fear of what she is about to see, they have the floor: “I want to make sure we’re all on the same page. So, I’ll ask a question, and you give me a satisfactory answer or I’ll get a little mad. And when I get mad I have an unfortunate habit of lashing out. I’m sure you understand that impulse. Anyway, if you don’t answer to my satisfaction then I’ll get mad and I’ve got this knife, here, and a nice stretch of unscarred skin from your friend’s inner arm to his shoulder.”

They draw the knife across the inside of his arm and split the tattoo. Jet grits his teeth. It’s a shallow cut that expertly avoids his axillary artery. Exceptionally numbed, then

“Stop!” Juno swears “What do you need to know?”

“Wait a second, I’m just drawing the boundaries. Look.”

Jiorjah moves to Jet’s shoulder now and makes an identical cut on the ball of it. Blood beads and drips sullenly from the cut. The rivulets pool in the crook of his arm and spill along the chair.

Juno struggles not to retch. Jiorjah can see that they have struck a nerve and unearthed a few old traumas. Their eyes gleam.

“From here to here is where I’ll cut him. I’ll make one on each side until it meets in the middle and then I’ll start again until there’s no more skin to cut. Then I’ll keep going on his muscle and if we have to hit bone, well, maybe I’ll do a little bit on the other arm. How does that sound, Juno Steel?”

“Don’t watch.” says Jet.

“Kayrrine, make him look. Hold his chin. Like this.”

They demonstrate with Jet, clamping him into an upright kind of head-lock with one arm and steering him by the chin with the other so that he is forced to stare straight ahead. Jet thinks about biting a chunk out of their arm, but that would only make things worse and therefore harder for Juno to watch.

“Jiorjah,” Kayrrine’s face has changed from red to blanched “Is this necessary?”

“If you want to have something to show your cousin before her clean up crew gets here, then yeah, it is. Besides, this is a unique opportunity! We got the Unnatural Disaster and one of the contemporary folk heroes of Mars here in our basement. Just try to enjoy yourself.”

Jet tries to communicate to him, as best he can from a headlock, that things are going to be alright. They will get through this together.

And then Jiorjah gets to work.

(Upstairs)

The big guy, Jet Siku-something, he doesn’t cry out when he gets hurt. Sometimes they do that. Soup has heard a lot more than she’s supposed to have heard. If her mom was thinking smart today she wouldn’t have let Soup come to the Centre, she would have made her go home with Cash and stay there until mama picked her up or something. Mama usually forgets. Or she says that she forgets but really she didn’t want to or couldn’t get off the couch, so Soup ends up staying extra late and Cash tries to pretend it’s fine even though both of them are tired and sick of each other.  
Cash went off somewhere. She said she wasn’t feeling good and told Soup to wait in the front lobby, where some of the other people put their kids while they do stuff in the basement, or in the back with all that red stuff that looks like blood but doesn’t smell like it, or in the back-back where those things that look like boogers float in stuff that looks like lime juice. It really frustrates Soup not to have words for what’s around her. She likes knowing the names of things and sticking to them. That is that. This is this. If she doesn’t get them mixed up then people won’t misunderstand her and will take her seriously, unless they were never gonna do that in the first place. Most don’t.

But Juno listened. Jet listened. Jet let her hide behind him and maybe he did let her go, but Soup saw his face and he didn’t look like someone giving up. He looked like a guy with a plan. And he had something in his back. 

Cash went off. Cash didn’t think about the fact that Soup could not listen to her. Just, get up, creep past all the adults busy with their ‘supplement’ and post by the door. Mom keeps talking about sound-proofing it. She keeps forgetting, though. Every time she comes up with an idea for the Centre she has to leave it because the basement guy does something that drags all the attention back to him.

Soup knows for sure it’s gonna be bad when Nadeing comes up. She hears her coming up the stairs and waits to get caught, so Nadeing’ll yell, and Jet and Juno won’t forget she’s still around. Nadeing is walking funny. It looks like she sunk her hands into a bucket of red paint. Soup is scared of what the other two look like. Other two what, though? Spies? Rescuers? She saw a stream about Jet, only that Jet had bloodshot eyes and a bad temper and wasn’t as tall. Also, she didn’t really get what was happening. A lot of the stuff went over her head. She didn’t know what the words meant and had to turn the stream off half-way through because her mama was coming upstairs, and Soup didn’t want her to know that she’d figured out how to get around the child-block on the TV a long time ago. What she saw in that stream, though, she thinks it probably wasn’t about the guy they got in the basement. The guy who doesn’t scream even though Soup knows that Jiorjah is probably cutting him up right now.

She isn’t supposed to know that Jiorjah does that. But Jiorjah hasn’t been here long- they got swapped out for some other person, just as scary, because Cousin Min didn’t think the first guy did a good enough job. Jiorjah’s been here for two months. At first Soup was interested in them, thinking that she might have an adult ally at last (apart from Cash, who’s useless because she’s too scared of Soup’s moms to really stand up for her), but when she got close enough she realised that Jiorjah was off. Like, a dangerous type of off. And then she saw what happened to Treelore, what Jiorjah made the guy in the basement do to Treelore, and she figured out that the thing that was ‘off’ in Jiorjah was that every time they looked at you they were thinking about how they’d kill you if it ever comes up. 

Knowing this, Soup has her ear up to the draughty space between the floor and the bottom of the door. The adults that came from Number 4 are still milling around with their big guns and Cousin Min’s name as every third word in their conversations. They won’t see Soup there unless they come looking for her.  
Jiorjah talks. Then Juno. Then Jiorjah. Then Juno. Juno sounds like he’s gonna start crying or screaming at any second, but he’s too afraid to commit to one thing. Juno’s scared and it scares Soup to know that her best chance of getting away from The Platonium may not even be able to get away from her mom’s creepy friend. 

“-independent operation because he thinks he can do whatever he wants with his Dark Matters buddy backing him up. It would be so easy to call up a childhood buddy turned detective turned whatever the hell you’re calling yourself right now, and ask him to set up a sting like this.”

“You’re not using the word ‘sting’ right,” Juno’s voice gets higher “And you better check your carbon monoxide detectors, because Mick Mercury isn’t the fucking mayor! Old-Towners aren’t even allowed to vote in civic elections!”

“Oh, you’re good at playing dumb. I almost believe that you’re this dumb.”

And then her mom, adding “I don’t understand why you won’t just go along with what they’re saying. Spare your friend the pain.”  
She talks to Juno like she talks to Soup. I don’t understand why you won’t sit still, Soup. I don’t understand why you won’t stop fidgeting. I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I won’t understand either you need to just do what I say-

“That’s right,” water hits the floor. Water, but thicker. “How much more are you gonna put him through? Some wife you are.”

“We’re not married! I don’t- I won’t admit to something we haven’t done, especially if I don’t know what that’ll make you do to us-”

“Nothing!” Jiorjah laughs “Nothing but hand you over! I just want to know what to tell Min when we do, ok?”

“So stop trying to get me to lie to you! I keep telling you, we’re independent contractors! We were approached by someone else! You wouldn’t even know the name!”

“Try me.”

“La Charlardora.”

A scoff “Nice try. Who do you think dobbed Treelore in? La Charladora wanted nothing to do with his crusade.”

“But- Nadeing.”

“Nadeing’s not smart enough to suspect her own husband. She loved him too much for that. By the time we realised who our leak was, the only way Nadeing could avoid getting taken down with Treelore was by helping us kill him, so you’re kind of right. Now, if this is the story you’re sticking to, why would La Charladora send an independent investigation into our programme? She should know better.”

Juno has to think for a second “Obviously, she doesn’t. Look, she’s playing you. Whatever allegiance you think you have, Kayrrine, Jiorjah, La Charladora’s first priority is her own empire. She told us that she had no idea what was going on here, ok? I only know it’s a Martian down there because I’ve seen them before. She- my best guess is that she wanted us to get something for her so she could start her own version of the supplement.”

“Hm.”

Water hitting the ground again.

“Stop it! I’m telling you the truth!”

“Sure you are.”

“I am! It’s true!”

“I feel like we’re missing some information here. It’s Unnatural that really bothers me. How did you just happen to cross paths with him? And he’s been so quiet these last few years- how did you drag him out of his hermitage? It’d make sense if you two were, y’know, but I’ve heard tell that the Unnatural doesn’t do that.”

Jet speaks then. Soup is glad- part of her was worrying that him being so quiet was because he was too hurt to talk, or maybe Jiorjah took his tongue out.  
“How is it that you know enough about the various criminals of the galaxy to know I’m ace-aro, but you have no idea what I have been doing over the last two years?” he laughs. Soup doesn’t like the noise. It sounds like it comes from a different, meaner person “Seclusion is far behind me. Just this past year, I caused M’tendere Beza to be killed. Surely you must have heard?”

“That was Dark Matters.”

“Oh, I helped. And if you really are so in touch with the underworld, how could you have possibly missed all the sightings of the Ruby7?”

“People are always making shit up. Don’t try to get me off-topic-”

“How can I when you have no idea what you’re talking about?”

Jiorjah grunts with effort. There’s a wet sound that reminds Soup of when her moms are cooking, moving meat around a chopping board.  
Juno yells wordlessly, but his mouth is covered.

Her mom: “Jiorjah, they want both of them alive!”

Soup’s eyes sting. She shouldn’t be listening to this. She should just wait. Ok. Wait. They’ll be ok. Soup needs to focus on being ok herself so maybe she’ll find a safe place to sit and wait. If Juno knew she could hear him, he’d probably tell her to clear off anyway. Kids shouldn’t have to hear this kind of stuff. Like she hasn’t heard it a dozen times before. 

But even as Soup’s getting up to find a spot, a shadow falls over her.

“Cash?”

Cash walks doubled up. She clutches her belly and makes sobbing noises. Her pretty face is scrunched up in pain, but not really, because her face doesn’t move like skin anymore and it can’t do expressions well. 

The way Cash talks is wrong too. Like her tongue suddenly got so big that her mouth doesn’t know where to put it “Soup, go. You need to…”

(Downstairs)

Juno can’t look at what is happening. Just the sound of Jet’s flesh being parted and his blood spilling onto the ground as Jiorjah turns unnecessary flourishes with their knife is a strain on his nerves that, clearly, he won’t be able to bear for much longer. This last blow has been the worst so far. Down to the muscle. If Jet can’t get to some serious and uninterrupted medical care before the end of the day, well, he’ll probably bleed out, but he’s probably also going to need physiotherapy to recover a full range of movement in his left arm. Good thing Jet is right-handed.

“Please,” Juno’s chin trembles “Please stop hurting him. Please.”

Jiorjah’s hands are shaky too. They have moved past anger or frustration with Jet’s stoicism into an animalistic need to hear their prey’s death cry. They need to know that they have hurt him.  
Moving slowly, Jet turns his head and glances down at the knife. It is buried in his shoulder at an awkward angle so that its shape continues as a ridge beneath his flesh and re-appears just above his elbow. The tip of the knife looks like a piercing. Blood wells up around the wound but does not spill yet. He feels no pain. Only the numbness of shock from his shoulder down, and a bit of the tight cuff around his wrist. 

Jiorjah glances between the newest wound and Kayrrine, their chest heaving.

“I think,” they breathe “I think that’s enough.”

“I’ll kill you.”

Kayrrine and Jiorjah look to Juno.

A tear drips off Juno’s jaw. His eye remains shut.

“I’ll kill you.” he repeats “The minute I get out of this chair, I’ll kill you.”

“It’s nice to have goals.” 

Jiorjah thinks the better of retrieving their knife from Jet’s arm. Kayrrine is dismissed with a wave and takes advantage of her opportunity, leaving them alone with Jiorjah, which is what Jet wanted. Now there is no one to threaten Juno as he engages Jiorjah. However, a new problem has arisen; he can’t snap the cuffs with the present condition of his left arm. He’s going to have to do this handcuffed. Fine.

Jiorjah makes the mistake of putting their back to him. Of advancing on Juno with menace. Jet has been pushed to his limit; time to work on the mouthy one.

“Alright, your turn. I’ll have to leave the knife in your friend. Lucky for you, I always remember to bring spares.”

Jet flexes his good arm and pulls up. The duct-tape that held him in place tears. Luckily, at the same time, there is a scream of horror and a sound like furniture hitting the floor that covers up the tearing. Startled, Jiorjah looks up.

“What the hell are they doing?”

Twisting his arm painfully behind his back, Jet grabs the muzzle of the rifle and pulls it up and out via his collar. The bayonet end flicks out and cuts away the rest of the tape silently. Vision swimming, ears pounding, he rises, silent as a ghost, and aims as best he can for Jiorjah’s calf.

And then someone walks past him. They give him a sideways glance as they go, and the apologetic smile of someone squeezing through a café line to get to the bathroom.

Take a decade off the face, buzz the braids back and add a beard,and it’s Juno Steel that has breezed past Jet to grab Jiorjah by the wrist. 

(Upstairs)

Soup hears the footsteps but she doesn’t even think to run away, even though she recognises it’s her mom. 

“No, we gotta leave…the building…you gotta…” Cash chokes off. A green thing falls out of her mouth. Not falls- unwinds. A thing covered in barbs. Her tongue.

The door opens. Her mom notices Cash immediately “What’s wrong with you? Are you sick? Did you miss your dose?”

Cash opens her mouth to reply. A green thing comes out instead - unwinds. A thing covered in barbs. Her tongue. Muffled by her tongue, Cash tries to scream, and then her arms are shooting out, growing longer, getting pointy, the fingers melting in, the flesh greening and browning like mould on old bread, and her neck is so long that her head bends backwards against the ceiling.  
Her mother’s hands fly to her mouth. She screams. Without even looking at Soup, she runs the other way, leaving Soup alone with the thing spilling out of Cash.

Not like Soup didn’t see that coming.

(Downstairs)

Jet is, as he is so often reminded, a big man. A strong one by the standards of his birthplace and his home in exile. Picking people up is no struggle for him. Hell, if he holds his back right he can pick up and hold the damn fridge for a few seconds. What the Martian does, as they take Jiorjah’s wrist and in a gentle gesture toss them into the opposite wall, is no more a feat of strength than it is when a human steps on an ant.  
The sound that Jiorjah’s head makes against the floor is not promising. They fall to the ground like a discarded tissue, their head falling at such an angle that aims their sightless eyes at the small pool of blood they created around Jet. Their eyes are open. Blood streams steadily from a nostril.

Not dead. Nor are they far from death’s threshold. 

Satisfied with its work, the Martian looks to Juno.

Jet gets there first. He gets Juno out of the chair with the bayonet faster than Jiorjah cut away his sleeve and, heedless of his injured arm, scoops Juno behind him and backs him towards the other wall, where a wall of mist dissipates.

But Juno pushes back “Wait! I think it- it was helping us!”

The Martian walks towards them. 

“How can you be sure that wasn’t revenge?”

“If it was then we’re fine! We haven’t done a thing to it. Uh, wait!”

The Martian stops. It turns its head, Benten’s head, towards the stairs and the weird cacophony coming in under the door, but this does not hold its interest for long, and it inches forwards again.

Juno ducks under Jet’s arm “Do you need help?”

The Martian stops in mid-step. Then, as if attempting to mimic a foreigner’s gesture, it nods.

For some reason, the tension in Jet’s chest releases. He recognises something like fear on its face. A mimicry of fear. And then it comes to him why the Martian chose to wear the face of Juno’s dead brother- the person Juno loves and misses the most. Logically, the person whom Juno would spring to help.  
Only the Martian doesn’t seem to understand death the way humans do, if it can recognise it at all. It should be long-dead along with the rest of its kind, mouldering in smothered necropolises.

“How? What do we need to do?”

The Martian points to its- to his chest. Then to the wall behind.

Juno follows his finger “Are you- is there another level down there? Is your real body there? Uh, look, if you can show us how to open it-”

Soup bursts through the basement door. She’s grinning with fright and flies down the stairs three at a time, away from a mass of something green that bulges through the door after her. A second after her feet hit cement, the door frame snaps to splinters. A great green girth oozes into the room. Screams issue either from an unseen mouth or within it.

“Cash is a blob now!” Soup laughs hysterically and throws herself at Jet and Juno’s legs “Cash is a blob and my mom left me!”

“What the fuck is that!” cries Juno.

“I just told you, my nanny’s a blob! My mom left me to be blobbed by her! Can we-” at last Soup realises there is another person in the basement, nonplussed by the encroaching mound of green flesh “There’s two Junos.”

“That’s- not quite, kid, but close.” Juno scoops her up but is too short to hold her properly, so she dangles from his arms like a fat cat in a child’s “Uh, Martian, can you get us out of here? Can you help us?”

The Martian nods. This time Jet does not get in front of Juno, nor the child; he lets the Martian walk past them and then between them, and then through the wall.

“Well that doesn’t fucking help us!” exclaims Juno.

“Oh, I know this one!” Soup gestures to be held up to the wall. Juno obliges.

She mashes her little hands into the wall. An instant later, there is a click, and a good metre of it shrinks backwards, opening onto a steeply sloped hallway that curves off out of sight. White lab-lights glare along the curve. Urging them downwards.

“In we go, then.”

Jet gives Juno a gentle shove into the secret passageway and, straining with just one arm, manages to close it after them just as the stairs are cracking beneath the weight of the expanding flesh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It only occurs to me as I'm editing this that I should add a disclaimer: I'm not into inflation. If that's your bag then that's fine, but I promise you, this is supposed to be a horror thing...they're turning into partial Martians because they drank so much of the supplement. I promise it wasn't supposed to be as weird as it ended up sounding!


	10. Souperpowers, kid-gunk and our friend the mayor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: mention of domestic abuse (physical+emotional), mentions of past emotional manipulation, implication of past passive suicidal ideation, mentions of dead/preserved bodies (non-graphic and not gross), reference to graveyard etiquette specific to Judaism, treatment of wound with inadequate supplies, depiction of significant wounds, child near to significant wounds/watching the treatment, mention of possession, implication of past opioid addiction, friends arguing over issues of manipulation, bleeding, lots of bleeding, implication of abduction, implication of physical abuse using medical tools, gore
> 
> Suggested listening: 'New Born' by Muse

No one has ever died for Juno. He resolved a long time ago that no one ever will, because a death for someone else’s benefit is just a way to throw blame. After the police got to the apartment, Juno never spoke to his mother again. If he did he has no doubt she would have told him that Benten’s death was his fault: you were a bad kid, Juno, and your brother had to die for you because as usual you weren’t around to take responsibility for your shit. Blah blah blah, Sarah Steel nonsense, deeply traumatising, whatever.

Diamond said they would die for him, once. It was one of those things they said after a ‘fight’ (a beating), a plaster like the ones they pressed over Juno’s cuts and bruises.

“I would die for you, you know. I love you.”

Juno just nodded. The little whispering voice of resistance that Diamond never managed to quash, in the five years of their relationship, laughed at that. The only way Diamond would ever die for Juno is if they were sentenced to death for his murder. A bad punchline for an unfunny joke that took way to long to be told.

Dying for your loved one is a final ‘fuck you’, an echo that won’t stop for as long as they live, assuming they don’t manage to toss the memory into a pit of other repressed trauma-memories. It is cruel and stupid and if anyone ever tried it, Juno swore he’d kill them himself for trying to do that to him.  
So he doesn’t know how to feel about what Jet just did. About how far Jiorjah could have taken it had they not embarrassed themselves by stabbing Jet so deeply that the knife was buried in his arm. Jiorjah was a professional, obviously. They knew to look for vulnerability and found that in Juno, so took it out on Jet, and instead of turning the situation around so that he could share in the suffering, Juno just shut his eye and whimpered. For all of the bravado and anger he felt about jackasses threatening to die for him, he was going to let Jet do it. 

Please die for me, Jet. I want to live now (most of the time) because I got a boyfriend and a home and I’m learning to be nice to people. I’m scared to die because a tiny part of me thinks that maybe Space Hell is real (don’t tell my rabbi) and maybe my mom’s saving me a spot. So just die for me. I know you’d do it, you stupid, noble ex-junkie knight of a man. 

Sometimes Sarah is right about him. A little monster. Who will Juno trick into dying for him next?

No, wait. Remember what you learned in self-esteem boot-camp. What would Rita say?

Shrimp snacks.

Not helpful. What would Rita say that is helpful?

You’re holding onto a kid, boss, one thing at a time. Just don’t let Jet face-plant if he passes out from blood loss. 

The kid isn’t anywhere close to shock which means that it’s coming later or she’s already been desensitised to intense and protracted fear. Either way, Soup doesn’t need the fresh trauma that just got dolloped onto her, nor whatever the rest of the day is going to bring. Juno thinks about blind-folding her and plugging her into his comms with some classical music until they get out of this- he’s strong enough to carry 26kg of kid for a while. Now, if Jet decides to pass out, that is where the problems are going to arise. Juno is not going to be able to carry 100kg of Earthling for more than a few steps. Roll him, maybe. Get the Martian to help out, though Lord knows Jet won’t be happy if he comes to in the arms of an unknown entity that just flipped a grown person across a room like a goddamned pancake. 

One thing at a time, Juno, one thing at a time.

The hall is surprisingly long. It curves twice before depositing the three humans and the Martian into yet another hallway, this one level and lit like a dentist’s lobby. Once again, the Martian walks through the door without an apparent concern for how his companions are to follow him. Juno is about to start swearing when the door swings open with an ominous slowness, and then he wants to swear at the Martian for letting them through, even more so as they immediately realise the Martian has brought them to a cemetery.

Four of them, suspended in tall tubes filled with a viscous liquid speckled with bits of debris that are either preservatives or crumbs of the Martians themselves peeling off. Three faces with seven eyes shut between them, four frog-like mouths downturned by death. With the tomb being darkened and Miasma actively trying to kill him, Juno didn’t see much more of her than slimy shadows and tentacle limbs that tore wherever they touched.  
She seemed enormous. Going by these specimens she was, but not in the way he thought. 

“Jet, here. Let me at those cuffs. I can pick them, I think.”

While Juno works at the cuffs with one of the numerous ‘tools’ (bobby pins) he tucks into his braid for this purpose, the three of them have a chance to catch their breath and get an idea of where the Martian has brought them.

The things in the tubes are not so much huge as they are long. Like, squid-shaped long, their heads facing downwards in a sleeper’s position while the skirts of ten, tooth fringed tentacles and the fleshy parachute of a short torso stretch above for a few metres. Each of the tentacles are equal in length and size, ending with a paddle-shaped appendage that looks like it would support the Martian’s weight the way a human’s foot does. An ideal appendage to carry a heavy body over the slipping Martian soil and sands.  
The heads are stacked in a column above the short torso. The topmost head is capped with a strange dome-like growth that reminds Juno of a helmet, of a skull that grew on the outside of the body as opposed to the inside. A faint greenish tinge colours each of the caps, which could be down to the odd lighting in the tubes or a sign that at least part of the Martian diet involved photosynthesis. The mouths must have been vestigial by this point in their biological history- if they ate through their heads and talked through their minds, then the mouth was just a place to burp from.

Each specimen is motionless. Juno doubts they have moved of their own volition since before his ancestors began smacking two rocks together over a mound of dry grass. 

Each tube takes up a corner of the room, pillar-like, with a panel of screens fanned out at their bases, dark at the moment. At the end of the room, weirdly, a curtain has been hung. A privacy partition? Hiding the living from the dead?  
Logically, that has got to be where the live Martian’s body is- if this Martian is indeed alive. Maybe Martian souls produce powerful ghosts?

Before Juno subjects himself to whatever the horror has been done to the living Martian, he’s got to take care of Jet. 

Soup, of course, runs to the nearest tube and smashes her face up against the glass. God, Juno doesn’t want to think about just how much kalut rosh he’s committing and permitting right now. The Martian is not disturbed by the casual defilement of their comrades. Once the cuffs have come off, Juno makes Jet sit, which takes as their cue to leave. They walk over to the curtained part of the room and disappear into the fabric without so much as stirring it. 

Rita voice: worry about one thing at a time Mistah Steel. Worry about blood. Lots and lots of blood and so little skin to pull back over it. There must be strips of Jet laying on the floor above them.   
Blood. Blood and Benten’s head open on the floor- no. Shut up, brain. Please shut up. 

It won’t. The room spins. Maybe if he just doesn’t look too hard at the wounds or pretends that Jet’s gotten himself covered in jam…

“Ok, the good news is most of these are super shallow. This, uh,” Juno gestures where he thinks the knife is sheathed in Jet’s flesh, as vertigo has forced him to shut his eyes or risk a faint “I’m just gonna bandage around this. I’ll let Vespa fix that. As for painkillers-”

“You flatter me by pretending to forget, Juno, but I am an ex-addict. Or a present addict at risk of re-offending. However you want to think of it. There is a non-opioid type that can match the strength of the addictive kind that I use, but you…you may have burned all of what I brought with me when you burned the house.”

Juno cringes “Jesus and Krishna, Jet, I’m so sorry.”

“It was necessary to cover our tracks. There is more on the Carte Blanche. I can wait until we are back.”

“That could be hours.”

“I have borne worse injuries for longer.”

“You didn’t scream.” 

Jet raises an eyebrow “No. I was trying to stay calm. You had enough to worry about with my adding screaming to the mess. Did that not come across?”

At that point, Juno starts to cry. Carefully, he hugs Jet around his arm, squeezing him as tight as he dares to. Jet hugs him back with his good arm. Dust shakes from the ceiling. A small spout of plaster-dust falls between them and puddles on the ground, shaken by the continuing chaos over-head. This sub-basement is sound-proofed so Juno can only imagine the kind of transformative carnage that’s going on up there.   
But that is up there. Jet is down here, in front of him. One thing at a time. Besides, crying has released some of the blank, brutal terror that the sight of blood struck into him, though some of it has stained Juno’s clothes too thanks to the embrace. Now when Juno looks at it, feels its warmth sticking to his belly and chest, when he tells himself it is only paint, he believes himself, because as long as he is fear of Jet dying in his arms is stronger than his fear of blood, he can trick his phobia into taking a back-seat. 

Juno sniffs “Ok. So. Let’s get that arm wrapped up, then we’ll see about getting you home.”

There is nothing on hand to act as bandages save for their clothes and possibly the curtain. No way that Juno is going to cover open wounds with fabric that hung in the same room as a couple of percolating aliens. Since Jet’s shirt is already hanging off of him in rags, Juno just rips it the rest of the way off. It occurs to him that this should be hilarious. Jet, with his shirt falling coquettishly off a bared shoulder and his princess-hair tumbling in all directions; Juno with his ten o’clock shadow and his eyepatch. This probably looks like the cover of a romance novel that caters to some very specific fantasies. 

Soup has been conspicuously not looking at them while Juno was crying, but the sound of cloth being torn proves too much for her child-brain to resist, and has her darting over, snatching the shirt from Juno’s hands to finish tearing it into strips for him. The sight of raw flesh also invokes a childish bloodlust in her so that she has to be warned off from poking at the gashes.

“Does it hurt?” she asks, completely serious.

“Does what hurt?”

“Your arm!”

Jet makes a show of looking at his uninjured arm “Why would that hurt?”

“No, the other arm!”

“Oh, does this hurt? No, of course not. Why would you think it hurts?”

Meanwhile, Juno wraps the cloth tight. Necessity makes Juno brutal- he ties tight knots that pull at the edges of Jet’s cuts, the knots themselves re-wrapped so that they dig into the wounds too. Keeping pressure on these wounds is what will keep the blood in and, hopefully, Jet’s life in his body. The only sign that Jet is at all conscious of what’s happening to his body are the occasional, sharp intakes of breath that make him stumble over every other word. These grow more frequent as Juno comes to the hilt of the knife and the buried blade. He is sure that bandaging this knife in place is making the existing wound even worse. Nothing he can do about that. Vespa will fix it. It’s just common sense not to pull foreign object out of the stab wound

Either to distract himself or her from the shittiness of the situation he is explaining his tattoos to Soup. His eyes stray over her head every now and then, to the curtains.   
“…keep things out of my body that are not invited.”

“Wait, how do you invite a ghost into your body?”

“I won’t tell you that, partly because it is knowledge that belongs to my culture alone and partly because I suspect you’re asking because you think it would give you super-powers.”

Soup frowns “Yeah, but I’d call ‘em Souperpowers.”

“You need to watch me carefully until we are further away from these Martians. Without all of my joints tattooed there is a possibility that I will be possessed.”

“How am I gonna tell that you’re possessed?”

“My head will spin all the way around. I may levitate.”

“Aw, come on! Those are super-powers! I wanna be possessed!”

Juno is devastated on Soup’s behalf. She has just lost her entire world. It is gone. One mother left her behind. The other is out of reach. Whether or not Soup wanted that world or wanted to see the parents that formed it, it is gone, and whatever happens to her next is largely up to Juno and Jet. No child should have to take responsibility for their own wellbeing. The fact that Soup had to makes Juno sick into the deepest part of his core. He has to get her out of this place.   
And as for the rest of The Platonium? Juno doesn’t know what he’d do to help these people. He doesn’t know how he would start or what he would even be helping them with- did they transform into Martians? Is that because the Martian did something to them? Is that because they drank so much of the cure-mother prime that their bodies did that on their own? Does that mean that the cure-mother is a wash out? Say, if they were to try some small dose of it on Nureyev, would he turn into a giant green slug too? 

Juno cannot help but feel sorry for the cultists as well- sorrier for The Platonium’s normies, though, who have presumably been overrun by Martian monstrosities without a bit of warning. But he feels bad for the cultists.   
Even though some of them pointed guns at him and his friend, even though their leader allowed Jet to be tortured by a sadist who needed to blow off a lot of steam, he cannot bring himself to think that they deserve to be hurt or killed. He was in a cult of his own, in a way. A cult of inwards anger and obsessive self-destruction. He hurt people and would have carried on doing it had he not reached his breaking point with the Free-dome. There must be others up there. Other Juno Steels who have yet to reach their own Free-domes and may never get the chance to try for it because of this weird disaster visited upon them by powers they did not understand even as the cultists abused them. 

“Done.”

Considering that he only had shirt scraps and his own shaky hands, Juno thinks he has done a good job. They will hold for a few hours.   
As a final touch Juno borrows Soup’s jacket, knots it into a sling and lowers Jet’s arm carefully into it so that the hilt of the knife is parallel to his body. In this position it should not jostle too much within the cuts it has already made. The last thing they need is for the knife to be bumped and cut through Jet the rest of the way, and his bandages. Juno prays that none of Soup’s kid-gunk will make its way through the bandages and give him an infection. Vespa is not going to be pleased with the work Juno’s bringing her. At least her patient will be live.

“Can you stand?”

Jet rises slowly. Soup pushes one of his elbows up, either to help him or because she wants to see what it looks like when a man pushing seven and a half feet falls over.

Circumstances between him and Nureyev being what they were in those early months, Juno had to perfect his silent slink when he visited Nureyev in his room. He appeals to this experience as he approaches the curtains.   
The Martian is nowhere to be seen, of course. On the other side is a small space – more alcove than room, and much dimmer than the lab beyond it. The room is pared down to the barest of essentials for a medical ward. There is a surgical table equipped with more straps than necessary for human physiology, a few low-tech surgical machines shelved on the wall behind it and a few industrial-sized pallets filled with a green liquid. The supplement in its raw form. And, going by a half-empty packet of plastic tubs on top of a pallet, where the cult took their source of the supplement.

“Holy fuck.” Juno draws back the curtains “Soup, don’t repeat that. They’re drinking it fresh from the Martian, Jet. That’s like- that’s like squatting underneath the cow-”

Soup rolls her eyes “Duh! I could’a told you that.”

Jet looks down at her in askance “Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t know that was why you guys were here. I thought maybe you were trying to assassinate somebody, or get revenge for Mr Treelore.”

“So you thought we might have come here to kill someone you know, possibly one of your mothers, and you jumped to help us anyway?”

She pauses “I guess. Anyway, that stuff comes out of the tank that the Martian lives in an’ then there’s a little bit of the tank water in it too. I call that one Kabert, that one’s Noah, that one’s Sophie an’ I didn’t name that one because they look mean.”

“Wait, wait, you’re saying-” Juno jabs a finger at the tubes “That your mom has people drinking a tonic made out of corpse water and- and Martian’s blood?”

“Yeah. Didja drink it?”

Jet covers his mouth, gagging “No! That’s repulsive!”

“Yeah. It tastes gross too. But it works. If you put your arm in that juice an’ hold it there your arm will heal up, but you gotta keep drinking ‘cos otherwise your skin kinda falls apart in the same place ‘cos it didn’t get a chance to heal natural-”

“Thank you for the advice, Soup, but I would rather die of blood loss than put my arm in one of those tanks. Are they in there?”

“They walked in here. I don’t see them now.”

Juno looks back and screams, which makes Soup scream and even gets a manly yelp out of Jet. 

Gasping and clutching his chest, Juno steps back to show them the Martian has just reappeared. He assumes it is the Martian. They are no longer wearing Benten’s body (thank god for small mercies), instead clothed in a body that looks Earthling- that looks like Jet, actually, if you cut his hair short and dyed it black, and changed the shape of his nose, and gave him smile-lines and turned his clock back to the mid-twenties. 

Juno can tell by Jet’s face that this is his own dead brother, YJ. 

“Uh,” Juno drops the curtain again so Jet does not have to look at this inadvertent cruelty “Look, can you pick someone else? To wear. I don’t know how you’re picking faces to wear, from our memories? Picking from people we love, obviously, but could you not pick dead people? It’s- sorry. Humans. We get freaked out and sad when…when aliens dress up as our dead family members.”

Then Nureyev is standing in front of him. God, Juno is glad he closed the curtains.

“Ok maybe, not that one either.” the face changes to Juno’s own “So we just keep finding new problems. Look, you’re reading my mind, right? Can you just read my mind now and put on the face that I’m imagining now?”

A moment later, Juno rips down the curtains entirely and reveals the Martian, fresh and neat in a new likeness.

“Who’s that?” demands Soup.

“This is my friend from Mars, Mick Mercury.”

Soup snorts “The mayor? You’re friends with the mayor of Hyper City? Ok, sure, and I have sleepovers with Andromeda all the time.”

Why do people keep saying that about Mick today? No, no, focus. One thing at a time. 

Jet relaxes a little but maintains his distance. He keeps trying to shuffle Soup behind him. She is not having any of it.  
“Can you speak? Do you know any dialect of sign?”

No response. The Martian may not understand that Jet is referring to languages. They may even be attempting to respond to his questions with the telekinesis Miasma used, but Juno’s not getting any whispers. Not that he has heard anybody’s thoughts since he lost the eye that Saffron’s device grew behind. 

“They speak with their minds.” 

“Are you hearing them right now?”

“Nope. Not a bit…though, huh, that would make sense, wouldn’t it? That the Martian helped me because they can sense that I had a Martian, uh, sense organ, at one point? Is that it?”

The Martian does not respond to Juno. However, as Soup stoops and beckons them over, they do come to her side. Soup squats over one of the many splotches of blood that Jet has left around the room and begins drawing with her forefinger. She ignores the squawks of protest from the adults.

Soup draws out the first four letters of the alphabet, then writes ‘HI’ beside it, and waves to the Martian “Can you do that?”

The Martian leans over her scrawl. They consider the smudged shapes of the letter and the words with Mick’s cheerful eyes. Then, they straighten up on their haunches and nod.

(Now, Hyperion City)

There are two things for which Hyperion City mayors are notorious: their flagrant corruption and their tendency to end terms of in office at the same time as their own lives. In the 132 years of the office’s existence, its 72 mayors have died in ways which range from tragic to deserved to confusing. Mayor Joy tripped and impaled himself on the giant novelty scissors he was using to open a new station of the HC subway. Mayor Chettair was attempting to shoot her rival for re-election, but the laser ricocheted off her opponent’s brooch and bounced back between her eyes. Mayor Tsang was found dead in their apartment, face-down and soaked in saltwater on a rug that was otherwise dry, uninjured except for a recent paper-cut and a burn on their tongue that probably came from drinking coffee before it cooled down.   
His most recent predecessors each died under circumstances which could also be called mysterious; Pereyra went off into the desert for a reason that no one is yet sure of, and O’Flaherty apparently fought so hard to get himself into office that he died in the first few hours of it. Not before he’d fixed up Old-town, though, and left his successor a pair of absolute clown-boots to fill.

Enter Mick Mercury. If ever there were a man better suited to fill in clown shoes…

Mick isn’t an idiot. Well, yes, he is, but in a different way than Dark Matters and HC seems to think. Maybe Mick has spent five minutes trying to push a door clearly marked ‘pull’ and maybe he didn’t know that you had to put batteries in smoke detectors for them to work until he was in his 20s with two small house-fires under his belt, but that isn’t flat out stupidity.   
Mick knows he was only elected because some very, very powerful people wanted him to be

“You’re not stupid,” was Juno’s refrain in high-school “You just don’t know what the fuck you’re doing.”

Mick’s various girlfriends have been less kind. Pretty soon after Mick’s candidacy was announced, his rival dug up one of his ex-girlfriends and threatened to take her onto a Kanagawa stream to tell everyone what an idiot Mick was. That could have been a problem, because this girlfriend was the one who watched him put milk in the washing machine and laundry detergent in his tea. Lucky for Mick, the Kanagawas were on his side, not openly but definitely on his side, and banned the rival from all Kanagawa owned streams, so his ex-girlfriend’s tell-all was only heard by Hyperioners that own ham radios. This didn’t do much if anything to his ratings.   
That struck Mick as extremely unfair. No matter how embarrassing it would be to have his dirty laundry aired to the whole of the public, Mick feels like the city deserves to know the kind of person they’re putting in office. 

Sasha doesn’t feel the same way “Why are you talking about yourself like you’re some kind of serial abuser or embezzler? The most evil thing I’ve ever seen you do, Mick, of your own accord, was the time you did a ‘got your nose’ with a baby that made it cry. You’re as pure as pasteurised milk.”

“Just because I’m not cartoonishly evil like a lot of our mayors have been doesn’t mean I’m a good fit for the role. Nice people make mistakes too.”

They’re going over the same points of their argument for the seventh time today. Sasha wants Mick to be downstairs in city hall, celebrating his win with the campaign team, which the Kanagawa CameramenTM will surely be on hand to record. She keeps telling him that she is sure Cecil Kanagawa is too busy with his excavation to show up- as if the potential of having to meet him again is the thing that’s keeping Mick in his office.  
Currently, Sasha is pursuing him as he makes small laps around the walls of the mayoral office, taking in all the artefacts left by his predecessors, their books and reports, a cardboard box with ‘classified’ stencilled on in felt-tip, a row of oil-paint portraits of the first six mayors, and then a mourner’s altar set up for the late O’Flaherty.

“It’s a matter of basic goddamned courtesy, Mick!” her breath is on the back of his neck. 

Mick knows better than to look back; Sasha, much like an urban coyote, only gets madder when you make eye-contact “I’ll be courteous later.”

“If you keep out of the public eye like this, people are gonna think the new mayor is on death’s door again. We can’t keep losing mayors, Mick! You make the third in three years, and the provisional government was an almighty disaster. Speaking of- I need to talk to you about warrants.”

“Warrants.” Mick picks up a crystal-glass case which contains the bulky lens of Opportunity’s camera-head.  
Like all born or naturalised Martians, Mick observes rites of thanks and grieving for the rovers that paved the way for an eventual settlement. Holding an actual piece of one of the late great heroes of Mars is extremely emotional for him. Arguably more emotional than seeing O’Flaherty’s altar and, a minute ago when he opened a drawer in the desk, finding an old prescription bottle marked with the old man’s name. It just made Mick wonder if the office has any janitors or if he’s expected to clean up after himself on top of all the paperwork and public appearances. 

“Yes, Mick, warrants. There’s a real possibility that the old members of the provisional government are gonna get pissy about their powers being suddenly reduced. Especially by a newcomer. I need you to look through that packet I brought up for you and sign the documents, so we can get this wire-tapping legitimised.”

Kissing his fingers and pressing it to the glass, Mick sets the lens back where he found it “What do you mean by ‘legitimised’?”

“Something becomes ‘legitimate’ when it goes through the proper channels-”

“I know what the word means, Sasha, I’m asking what the whole- uh, because it sounds like you already went ahead and did this super illegal and immoral thing and now you’re wanting me to make it look like I signed off on that?”

Now, he does spin around and face her. Sasha is good at hiding her emotions if you don’t know her very well. Right now, to Mick’s eyes, Sasha looks like she was just slapped in the face with a fish.   
What is it that’s got her? That Mick knows what’s happening, what he’s going to be used for? That Mick thinks he’s in a position, for once in their long, long friendship, to do the scolding?

She recovers her bluster quickly “Come on, Mick. Don’t be naïve. You need to be protected.”

“So do my citizens.”

“Not if they’re actively working to undermine your position and your office.”

“Sure they do, Sasha. They have rights. It’s my responsibility to be good to everyone in this city. Stop them from hurting each other, sure, but I’m not just gonna default to killing and oppressing people to get that done. I’m supposed to be a departure from the mayors that Hyperion is used to.”

She puts her hands on her hips “Are you implying that I’m some kind of tyrant?”

Mick squares up to her. He and Sasha are about the same size. Throughout high-school, they raced to be the tallest with leads of a half-centimetre until they evened out to be around 6”1 each. Not a bad height for inner-city Martians. Whichever of them is taller depends on the type of shoes they are wearing. Today, Mick’s got a bit more heel that she does.

“You’re not gonna make me feel bad about bringing my own ideas to this, Sasha.”

“I’m not trying to make you feel bad. I’m trying to help you make informed decisions.”

“Why don’t you give me a chance to get informed?”

She frowns “What?”

“Did you bring any information about these people you want tapped? Who are they? How many of them are there? What’s the justification for their being tapped? How long do you plan to observe them? At what point do we absolve them of suspicion? And if they turn out to be, uh, turn-coats or traitors to the throne, or whatever, what do we do with them? What’s the plan of succession? Are we hoping that we can get rid of most of the old government and replace them with our new people? And who the hell are our new people-”

“Take a breath, Mick. You’re getting blue in the face.”

“Oh yeah? Well I hope you’re up-to-date on your first aid training, Sasha Wire, because I’m not half done!”

Mick finds himself advancing on her, then they’re circling each other around the mayoral desk.

“You think I don’t know what you’re doing, Sasha? You and Dark Matters? You think just because Juno isn’t here to point out the obvious to me that it’s not still obvious? Yeah, maybe it took me a little longer to figure it out- maybe I did have to jump out of bed in a cold sweat a couple of times and have a few epiphanies in the shower, but I still got there! And that’s another thing! Why the hell can’t I talk to Juno about this?”

Sasha feints to the right “Because! You know what Juno’s like!”

“Exactly!” Mick feints to the left “Inclined towards moral outrage! You’re not letting me talk to Juno about this because you know he’d immediately start putting shit together!”

“No, because from what you told me, Juno was fucking traumatised the last time he went near a mayor! Don’t you think that maybe, just maybe, having to go through the election process again might force him to relive some of the nasty shit that he had to do for Rameses O’Flaherty? And that whole THEIA soul thing? He left Mars to get away from that! We have no right to drag him back into it!”

“And that’s another thing!” Mick hikes a leg up and plants his foot on the highly polished surface of the mayoral desk, not caring if the sudden action strains the seams of his fancy-mayor pants “Why the sudden interest in HC from Dark Matters, huh? You guys were happy to leave us to fester in poverty and institutionalised crime right up until you got a hint that we’d be profitable!”

“Oh, fuck off!”

Mick is now standing on top of the desk “No, you fuck off! You’re taking advantage of me! That’s what you always do, Sasha, you always take advantage of me because you think I’m too stupid to figure out you are and then you rationalise it like it’s for my benefit! Well, guess what, Sasha? I’m the fucking mayor now! Sure, maybe I’m a muppet mayor-”

“Puppet! It’s puppet, you dumb-ass!”

“You know what I mean, you smart-ass! Just because you put a bunch of strings up my ass doesn’t mean that I’m gonna let you and your creepy bosses dominate me completely! If you want those fucking warrants signed then you better give me a list of good fucking reasons to do it-”

At this point Sasha and Mick freeze, realising, in unison and with identical horror, that they have an audience. Cecil Kanagawa has put his bleached head around the door and let them continue fighting without announcing himself. Mick’s face heats up. Sasha turns a vibrant shade of eggplant. Silently, she helps Mick off the desk.

“Am I interrupting something?” Cecil’s grin makes it clear that he knows he has and could not be more delighted about it.

“No, sir.” Sasha smooths the front of her shirt “We were just letting off a little steam.”

Mick nods “Drawing some boundaries.”

“Those were some loud boundaries.”

“I get excited about drawing boundaries.” says Mick “Something we can do for you Mr Kanagawa?”

Cecil sidles the rest of the way into the room. A CameramanTM looms in behind him, a concoction of equal parts gym-junkie and wolverine. It follows behind Cecil so closely that it ends up giving him a flat tyre with one of its clawed feet. Cecil stumbles almost out of the shoe, but keeps going, perhaps hoping that they did not notice.

“For starters you can stop calling me ‘Mr’. Cecil is just fine. After all, we’re going to be working together closely. We might as well treat each other as friends from the out-set. How does that sound to you?”

“Uh.” says Mick.

“Good!” 

Cecil extends a hand, which Mick mistakes for a handshake, but no, that’s a hug, that’s a full, double-armed, squeezing hug.   
Mick pats Cecil on the back. He meets the CameramanTM’s eye and thinks he sees something like sympathy, there, reflected in the dark pool of the lens.

At length Cecil lets him go, and gestures back to the door “I actually came here to do something for you, Mick- is it alright if I call you Mick?”

Mick grits his teeth “Sure.”

Sasha makes a noise that might be muffled laugh or else a groan of sympathy. 

“Great! So, after that unpleasantness with dear, departed Mayor Pereyra being killed by their bodyguard and all, Min and I – that is, Oka-san and I, we thought it would be practical to set you up with a bodyguard that won’t present the same sort of risk.”

“Oh, uh, thank- thanks? So he’s, or she’s, or, they, uh, do CameramenTM identify-”

Cecil laughs and pats his CameramanTM’s brawny shoulder “No, no, not little old Juno here! He’s one of my personal guards! Besides, we can’t let Dark Matters peep at our biotech designs just yet, can we, Ms Sasha?”

Oh so Sasha still gets to be a ‘Ms’? And what did he just call that CameramanTM?  
“Did you say-”

“Juno?” Cecil smiles wider “Yes, that’s his name. After our mutual friend, Juno Steel. You remember Juno.”

Mick looks to Sasha for help and sees immediately that he won’t get any- she’s mad, right now, and happy to watch him flounder “Sure. Sure, I grew up with Juno. Great lady. Great hair.”

“Speaking of Juno, where has he taken himself off to? I haven’t seen much of him since New-town opened. I assumed he’d be mantling over the place like a, a morally outraged peacock, you know? To keep crime from rolling back in.”

“He and his secretary left Mars a while back.”

“Oh! Were they- you know?”

“What, Juno and Rita? Nah. Not romantically. I think maybe they’re a QPR. He’s doing good. He likes his job, he likes his friend, he likes his partner. What more can you ask for?”

Cecil laughs. He has a very high, dramatic laugh, like someone who did a lot of theatre in high-school “A pile of money, maybe! Here, Mick, I’ll do you one better- we’ve left poor Té waiting in the hall for too long now and I’m already on their last nerve!”

The person at the door takes that as their cue and enters- no, ducks into the office. The door is not quite big enough to admit them at their full height because this office was built with Martians in mind. Mars grows her locals short. Most of them will never see the other side of 6ft and the office reflects that, obliging Té to stoop a good two feet and, as they straighten up, ensure that they do not bonk their head on a hanging lamp.  
This is Mick’s first time seeing an Earthling. That is, an Earthling that he could look at and immediately tell, yeah, you were raised under an ocean of natural atmosphere, you had room to stretch and grow, your parents can probably trace their families back to the time before the Exodus that populated the rest of the solar system. 

“Merciful mother of Mars.” whispers Sasha.

Cecil clasps their arm and guides them over. Reminds Mick of the time he saw a rat hitch a ride across a flooded street on the back of a pest-alligator.

“Té is one of the most valuable members of my personal security team,” Cecil squeezes their arm “Aren’t you, Té?”

They give Mick a weary smile “Well, sir, I sure have pulled you out of a lot of holes these past few weeks.”

“Oh, and these past few years! Always there for me, like my sleep paralysis!”

“I meant actual holes, sir. Over at the excavation site.”

“Right, right, those too! I don’t suppose you’ll have time, Mick, but if you ever manage to catch a re-run of the programme we’re filming right now, last week’s episode has this hilarious sequence where I fall into this great big shaft and I’m just hanging there by my harness for, what, ten minutes?”

“Twenty.” says Té.

“It was wonderful fun! At the bottom of the shaft these mega-cobras had made a nest- I’m thinking I’ll add something like it to the next season of J.O.D.”

Thankfully, Cecil excuses himself after that. He leaves Mick with a sinister promise to see him again soon. Maybe he doesn’t mean it the way it sounded; like he was going to break into Mick’s apartment to collect hair from his comb, maybe that’s just the way Cecil always sounds. 

As for the second thing Cecil left, the gigantic Earthling, Mick doesn’t know where to start. Do Earthlings shake hands? Do they bow?

For safety’s sake, Mick greets them the way he’d greet a hijabi. Hand over his heart and a little dip of his head that doesn’t break eye-contact.

“So, Té, that’s your name? Nice to meet you.”

A hand that could encircle Mick’s entire waist comes out at him. Mick grasps it and shakes it, as much out of habit as to stop it from getting too close to his throat. He does not like the look of those knuckles. 

This time their smile is more genuine. Toothier, too “I look forward to working with you, Mr Mercury, Ms Wire. If you don’t mind being a bit informal, actually, I prefer it if my employers just call me by my first name.”

“Which is?”

“Diamond.”

(The Platonium, now)

Martian glyphs; Juno should have known better than to hope for the best. Why in God’s good name would the Martian know any human language? Just because they’ve been abducted by the species and forced to feed them a combination of their blood and the excretions of their dead doesn’t mean that the Martian will understand a goddamned letter of the solar alphabets. Nor solar spoken language! Not solar Spanish or Hindi or Hmong! 

To Juno’s eyes the Martian has just made a few pretty doodles on the ground with Jet’s blood. To the Martian’s eye Juno’s letters are just as useless. So rather than attempting to teach each other new and disparate languages while there’s a small apocalypse going on above them, the humans and the Martian have resorted to a style of communication that strangers have been using since the dawn of time: doodles and pointing. 

“Ok so,” Juno waves a hand over the scribblings “What I’m getting from this is that The Platonium was built around you.”

The Martian nods.

“And you don’t know where you were before, because you were…uh…dead or asleep.”

In answer to that question, the Martian drew themselves as a rectangle with squiggly limbs and a line between its third and second face, which the humans have taken to mean beheading. The Martian then had to have the concept explained to them, which Soup was a little too enthusiastic to explain.

“And the- the transformations, uh, upstairs, that was you too, for sure?”

Another nod. Soup was also a little too enthusiastic about thanking them for their intervention.

“Why?”

Third time Juno has asked this. They still don’t understand the way the Martian has chosen to answer all three times: first, they touch Juno’s arm, then Jet’s shoulder and holding onto both of them, the Martian just stares. 

“I think they just like you guys.” offers Soup.

Jet is tired and gets paler each time Juno looks at him. He seems to be struggling to stay awake, as the bindings about his arm grow redder and damper “Juno, I am satisfied that they mean us no harm. Intentional harm.”

Juno isn’t. There has got to be something more to this than the Martian arbitrarily deciding that, hey, these guys seem neat, I guess I’ll entrust my survival to them!  
But Juno has already wasted time trying to figure out what the Martian wants of them. It’s better that he takes care of Jet first, then later, when circumstances are a little less life-threatening, he sits down with the Martian and some flashcards.

“Fine, fine. Ok, Martian, which one is you?”

The second problem: the Martian refuses to admit which one of the bodies belongs to them. There is a distinct, troubling possibility that the Martian is doing this because they cannot bear the thought of leaving their fellow dead to the mercies of The Platonium and its founders. It may also be that the Martian does not actually know who they are- in a society of genetic psychic clones, did they even have a concept of the individual?

Each time Juno asks, they look behind them. Expertly dodging the question.

“Can I get a hint? Please just- two or three to narrow it down from. Sophie? Noah? Anything?”

The Martian glances at Juno. Back to the room. They keep doing this.

With a sigh, Jet rises unsteadily and walks over to the room.

“I thought you wanted to die ‘stead ‘a drinkin’ that stuff!” calls Soup.

“I stand by that,” a grunt of effort “I found them.”

Jet reappears with something like an attaché-case with back-pack straps hanging from his hand. From the way he handles it there is some considerable weight. At the sight of the case, the Martian’s face animates. 

“This was behind a pallet of the supplement.”

Jet sets the case down. The Martian moves to meet him and grabs Jet’s good arm, smiling, and then does the second weirdest thing that Juno has seen today by stepping on top of the case, phasing through it, and disappearing with only a wisp of mist wicking off the surface of the case to indicate they were ever there.

“What the hell?” 

Jet kneels over the case “Don’t swear, Soup.”

“Hell isn’t a swear word.”

“Well it’s crass. Don’t be crass. Juno, can you give me a hand?”

Jet has him twist a dial mounted on the seam of the case. No sooner than Juno has twisted the numbers down to 0000 do the hinges pop open with a sound of pneumatic pressure releasing. Inside, curled up on themselves a dozen times over in a space that, in spite of being far deeper than the size of the attaché-case lead him to believe, is too small for their body. They have been cut in many places- like, hacked away, trimmed down, and then those wounds were plugged with metal caps that are stapled into the tissue. A wet, greyish sheen makes their skin more metal than flesh. The colour is nothing like the dead Martians. Nothing like Miasma’s.  
Gently, Juno reaches into the case and touches the Martian. He does not know what he is touching. Just that he needs to show the Martian that he sees them. That they are not alone. 

And, praise God, the Martian stirs. A stunted limb slithers into the mass of their doubled-up body, like a sleeper’s arm slipping underneath covers to avoid a chill, and reveals the profile of one of their faces. 

Jet’s hand joins Juno on the Martian’s scored body. He cups the Martian’s face and helps them look upwards, as it seems too weak to do so on their own and lets the Martian lean into him. Their mercury skin ripples in a pattern that suggests breathing or wheezing. 

For what must be the first time in many years, the Martian opens their eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are all Mick Mercury. I, specifically, am Mick Mercury. The other day I admitted to my friends that I had only just figured out that The Beachboys and The Backstreet Boys were not the same band, and the one who's also my roommate told me that living with me was like living in a reboot of the Encino Man. I then had to google what the Encino Man was. I like to think that my utter disconnection from pop culture adds to my charm. 
> 
> Also, Diamond Té. Diamante. Get it? Heh heh. Writing Cecil Kanagawa was pretty fun too. There's just something about an unhinged scientist/celebrity/spoiled brat that's fun to write.


	11. Is this a problem or a twist in our narrative arcs?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: Mentions of recovery from surgery, mentions of character being under anaesthetic, mentions of character being observed while asleep without consent/knowledge (it’s Nureyev beside Juno’s sickbed but you know gotta warn my audience), invasion by militia, blood, gore consistent with character continuing to have a knife in their arm, implication of character choking/smothering, significant gore, significant body horror, child in danger, child near body horror, swearing heavy chapter, mention of house fires, being handcuffed, passing out. 
> 
> Suggested listening: Devotchka, ‘How it ends’

(Around two and a half years ago, the Hanataba Clinic)

An hour and fifteen minutes after Juno goes down, Pakak arrives. Jet gave him a window of an hour or so where Juno can be counted upon to be both unconscious and not in active surgery. He wondered if Pakak was going to show up at all. Wished he would, if only for the chance to see the Ruby7 again. It is always nice to see the car and count its new dents- or ‘her’ new dents, if Pakak is to be believed.  
Jet mentioned it to him in passing. He always tells Pakak when he’ll be stopping in at a Hanataba clinic because he will not be able to answer is comms; they have not gone more than a week without talking to each other since Jet was 24. If Pakak can’t raise him immediately he assumes, often rightly, that Jet is in some sort of mortal danger and either worries until he hears from Jet again or has come over to help Jet out of it. 

It did not occur to Jet to keep things from Pakak because they have always shared the details of their lives; the mundane, the scandalous, the intimate, the public. Everything but Pakak’s name and what he is doing to handle his disease. These are his boundaries and Jet is comfortable observing them. Pakak treats him with the same respect. Therefore, when they ask favours or advice of each other, they’re building from a foundation of profound and unshaken trust. Pakak needs to hide a locked package stamped with ‘DANGER: NUCLEAR WASTE’ all over its front? Great, Jet has space for it in his garage. Jet needs an untraceable poison that has no taste nor odour, but won’t kill and only debilitates for three days? Sure, Pakak will check his pockets and his clutch, he probably has some of that laying around.  
Pakak needs a couch to cry on? Well he must really need it if he’s admitting to Jet at all that he even uses his tear ducts. Fine. Come on. Move in. Stay as long as you need to. Only, stop eating so much yoghurt, you’ll kill yourself. 

So, when Pakak not only fell silent when Jet mentioned the name of the man he was taking to the Hanataba Clinic but dropped and broke a glass on the other end of the comms, Jet knew something was going on. Pakak quickly made his excuses to get off the line. That was the day before Jet was due to get Juno to the Clinic, so Jet didn’t necessarily mind the excuse to go to bed earlier. Pakak called him again at 4 a.m. Jet’s time and, for the first time in their twenty years of friendship, divulged his secrets.

“That idiot detective whose eye you’re about to pop out happens to be the one who…who dealt me that blow last year, that required a convalescence on your couch. He- he inspired very intense feelings in me. I cannot help but feel some concern for him now…bismillah, Jet, what am I going to do?”

“Develop better taste in romantic partners.” said Jet, because he was half asleep.

“Jetffrey!”

“What do you want me to say? The lady wants that taken eye out of his head. The lady will have the out taken out of his head. I will facilitate this. What can you add to that, Pakak?”

“What are his chances of surviving?”

“Highly specific to the variables of his personal situation. He strikes me as a troubled person, Pakak, so there may be some difficulty in his regaining consciousness.”

“Ya’allah! Why is he even taking this chance?”

“He is humouring my suggestion. He does not believe the Hanataba Clinics are real or effective, but he is desperate. You and I know they are-”

“Does he even understand the risks? Risks that he’ll have such a powerful internal crisis that he dies on the operating table! When I catch the idiots who let that design flaw hit the factory floor-”

“Pakak, would you like to come and see him?”

A lot of sputtering. A lot of bluster. A lot of abuse towards Jet for having the gall to suggest it.

Jet talked over him “While he is unconscious. I am not suggesting that you have some kind of tearful reunion- although that may be on the cards if you take Buddy’s invitation.”

“What? What was that?”

“Irrelevant to the topic at hand. You are near to Mars at the moment. Take Ruby, it won’t be more than an hour’s trip. From the amount of yoghurt it took to drown your sorrows over this detective I am sure you would go much further for him-”

“I wouldn’t walk to the corner store for that man-”

Jet continued to ignore him, giving him an address and a window of time. He expressed that he hoped that Pakak would do what was best for him.

And now, the Ruby has drawn up outside and chirrups at the pleasure of seeing Jet again. He waves to it but does not leave the Clinic’s doorstep for fear that Juno will die the second he does.  
Pakak looks good. Tired from his sickness, cinched into his waist-trainer, but good. There is a vigour that accentuates his every movement which Jet rarely sees; a gratitude at being alive and relatively mobile that Pakak usually expresses after he pulls off a high-risks heist. Or if he has just beat Jet at a board-game. It’s a display of pettiness and earnestness that is unique to Pakak’s expressions, and the surprise of seeing it puts a smug little smile on Jet’s face, in spite of the weird solemnity of the occasion.

“This strikes me,” Pakak gives him a brief business-like hug “As incredibly creepy, now that I think about it. If you ever allowed one of my ex-lovers to climb into my hospital window and observe me under anaesthesia, I would send you into Space Hell myself.”

Jet steers him towards the recovery room “Be careful with that introspection. We wouldn’t want you to have a break-through.”

Pakak is not prepared for what he sees. Either was not ready to see his ex-lover’s face in the immediate aftermath of a major surgery or he was not ready to see his ex-lover in the first place. From Jet’s perspective, what, having done eight of these jobs as a kind of penance that his inner-Catholic won’t let him refuse, it is a neat job on a comparatively minor surgery. A bit raw, sure, because he only just finished the sutures and put the bandage on. But Pakak is not used to this. Pakak only knows that he is looking at a man that ‘inspired intense feelings’ in a state of utter vulnerability.

Juno is out. His face does not relax in sleep. If anything he looks even more pissed off than normal, though that may be due to the forms the procedure has taken inside of his mind. Hanataba procedures are strange. One part physical medicine, one part mental therapy. Jet has never undergone one of them before and never will, if it is up to him. He would rather process things at his own pace than have the Hanataba rip his brain open and spill his sins across the floor like a child’s marbles.  
Juno needs the help. Hopefully, he will receive it. Hopefully, he will get some of the peace he deserves. Jet has taken the eye out, he has brought the mourner to the bedside; he has done all he can. The rest will be up to Juno. 

When he gets his breath back, Pakak sits carefully at the edge of Juno’s sickbed and casts a critical eye over Jet’s handiwork “I suppose that was always going to leave a scar. It will suit him. Go well with that scar on his nose, I mean. Is he- will he be in pain when he wakes up?”

Jet shakes his head “You can touch him if you like. It won’t aggravate his wound as long as you refrain from poking it.”

“No. That’s horrifically creepy.”

“You are already being creepy. Commit to it. You don’t do things by halves, Pakak, neither in work nor pleasure.”

Permission! Now Pakak has no reason to resist the urge, so he leans over Juno and cups the uninjured side of the Martian’s face. For a long moment Pakak hovers over Juno like a spectre. Juno’s remaining eye moves beneath his eyelid. Following something in his dream, or else noticing Pakak.

“I told him my name, Jet.”

Jet knows from the way Pakak says it that Juno was not given an alias.

“As close to a name I have.”

“I hope he treasured it.”

“He learned to.” Pakak straightens up with a bitter smile, brushing a few stray wisps of hair from Juno’s damp forehead “Would you like to know it?”

Jet laughs “Your name? To what end? I’ve a name for you that suits my needs.”

“Thank you for doing this. Thank you for caring about him. Although I don’t suppose it’s really my place to thank you for independently forming an affectionate relationship with Juno, who made his feelings about the value of our relationship clear when he left me in a hotel room- Jesus, Jet, I wish I could still drink.”

Pakak spends less than ten minutes with Juno all-up. Too self-conscious, he thinks, even though Jet walks out to the Ruby7 and makes conversation to give them some privacy. It’s good to see Pakak finding things in the world, in other people, to take joy in. Jet has often worried that he will be the only person who knows to mourn the man when he does go. He worries that their friendship will be the only thing Pakak can look back on when and if his condition pins him to a sickbed- the only thing that has lasted long and not in some way involved romance or the threat of it. Maybe that’s one of the reasons for the longevity of their friendship; he can be sure that Jet will never take it into his head that they should sleep together. 

Pakak comes up the clinic ramp, scrubbing away streaks of mascara “What did you mean when you mentioned an invitation?”

Jet was hoping he’d forget to ask “Buddy has got a notion, recently, that she should track down the Cure-mother prime. You heard that Vespa Ilkay came back into her life? Well, it was one of those strange tragedies that always come to balance out the good in life. Her sister died the same day. Her brother is already dead. Her sister, Sportti-”

“You cannot be serious.”

“I am serious. Her name was Sportti.”

Pakak drops his face into his hands and laughs “Paternal cruelty is universal. Go on, Jet. Finish your pitch. Oh, dammit, I’ve smudged it all over my cheeks now.”

“Consider this a warning, Pakak. Buddy’s brother has been dead some years yet, as have her parents. Farmers out on the Nen. They have short life expectancies. Sportti was expected to go sooner rather than later, but it shook Buddy, I believe, to be reminded of her mortality on the same day that she got her wife back. She means to find the Cure-mother prime and she means to recruit a few others to her cause. There is me, of course, because I have no desire to knock around in the house alone while I could be contributing to society. There will be Vespa, there may be a cyber-criminal if she can be persuaded to join us.”

“Which one?”

“That one with no name nor apparent agenda. Whose work seems to match up with the commercial breaks of that pulpy streaming channel on Mars?”

“I am aware of them, yes.”

“Hopefully they will come along. Buddy also wants someone who knows their way around a heist. A man or masc-identifying, preferably, because she wants at least one man on the mission who is capable of seducing people.”

“Jet, are you asking me to join your hunt for the Holy Grail because you want me to flirt with marks for you?”

“That is an incredibly reductionist way to look at it. I will also need reliable access to the Ruby7 and do not want to deprive you- but, yes. We will discuss it later.”

“Call me when he wakes up, will you? And don’t tell him I was here. The more I think about how this looks, the more I wish I hadn’t come.”

They part with a hug and a promise, to the Ruby, that they will see each other soon. A few days after he puts Juno back on Mars, Pakak calls.

“I’ll come along. I won’t lie to you, Jet, I’m getting towards the end of the things I can do about my kidneys. If there is a cure-all I might as well be first in line to try it out.”

After all this, Jet was hoping that Pakak could start fresh with this man who’d stolen something from him. That looked like an epiphany, that vigil at Juno’s bedside.  
Instead of honesty, Pakak chose to pose his assless self on poor Ruby’s hood, drawl something sexy and dramatic at the confounded detective, and flounce off on precarious heels, leaving a promise to cause more problems in the future hanging in the air like a whiff of his cologne.

Ah well. Perhaps Pakak was getting sicker, but he was still very much himself.

(Now, The Platonium)

The thing about secret passages: if you find one, there are bound to be others nearby. It’s the same rule as with termites and teenagers in a public park. 

Because Jet still has a knife lodged in his arm and Soup is a kid, the duty of Martian-carrying falls to Juno. Pretty much the moment the Martian saw the humans with their own eyes, they were satisfied that they would be taken care of and promptly passed out with the confidence of a drunk whose best friend has just arrived at the party. The torch was passed. The Martian brought them this far. Getting to safety is a problem for the humans to solve.  
Fortunately, Soup knew her way around the lab a bit better than she should and pointed out an exit route that was tucked behind some of the pallets. The route was a windowless, seamless tunnel that brought them closer and closer to the sounds of the chaos spreading until they popped out of the back of somebody’s bedroom closet. 

Pushing through furs and silky night-gowns, Juno was ready to do a quick sweep of the house for Martians and/or cultists, but Soup barrels out ahead of him and declares it to be safe. Stupid ferrety kid. 

“This is Mrs Nadeing’s house.” Soup points into a carpeted corner of the kitchen “I puked there, once.”

Juno assumes Soup is not responsible for the rest of the damage. The ceiling is scraped and buckling in a trail that suggests something way too tall for the dimensions of the house appeared in the kitchen, then let itself out through a hole in the front of the house where the door used to be. The walls have also been pushed outwards. Juno has to pick his way around crushed photo frames and a sprinkling of glass to get to the porch, which looks like it was struck by a meteor. 

Juno pokes his head out the door “Where is everyone?”

“I don’t know. I don’t hear an evacuation siren.” Jet moves into the living room.

“I mean, I hear screaming. And I think the level above us is a little bit on fire. Either that, or The Platonium thinks grey rain is fashionable.”

“Oh, that doesn’t bode well.”

Jet has parted the plush curtains over the bay window. Through the thin sheets of smoke, Juno can see that The Platonium’s dome has been pierced. 

Juno never went to war. Mars was about as far behind the lines as you could get without going to Earth and with Earth being the non-entity that it is these days, it isn’t even counted as solar property. Sarah Steel wasn’t even a zygote when the war began and Juno was in his mid-thirties when it ended.  
All that Juno knew of the war came by diffusion- you just couldn’t help knowing about it in a city where the thousands of newsfeeds never turned off. A dead-eyed hero accepting a medal here, a debate over draft laws there, all of it floating on this undercurrent of apathy because it seemed like it would never end. And then, when the solars finally and allegedly won and the parades and protests passed through Hyperion City, Juno stayed indoors playing solitaire. It wasn’t his war. It wasn’t his victory.

But when the war-ships started coming back to Mars? When the warships were stripped of guns and filled instead with the walking wounded returning home? Juno remembers that. Juno remembers Rita calling him to the window, remembers going out to line the street with dozens of their neighbours to watch the scarred ships blot out the sun and whisk the Martian heat up into a dusty frenzy. He remembers holding Rita’s tiny hand and realising, for the first time, the scale of the thing that had been happening at the other end of the world. 

The sky of The Platonium could be Mars’s sky, on that long-ago day of home-coming. 

Twin mother-ships have breached the atmospheric shell that domes The Platonium, one of the splitting the projection of a moon, the other’s prow piercing through the simulated clouds. The back-end of either is open to admit the steady traffic of personnel shuttles towing cargo containers. They stream out of the ship on the left and trickle back up to the ship on the right, straining against the incredible, groaning weight of the now-filled cargo containers.  
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s in those containers.

“It would appear that the Wellness Centre’s benefactor is cleaning up.” remarks Jet “Or cutting their losses.”

“Jet, am I going nuts, or do you see that logo? On all the shuttles. On the damn prows. That- that’s not right, right?”

Dark Matters, everywhere. 

Whatever change in management killed M’tendere has also killed all semblances of operating in secret.  
Each of the ships are marked with a twisting sigil that is meant to represent the sun and the inner planets: the logo of Dark Matters. Up to this point, Juno has only ever seen it on the headers of files so secretive that the hard-drive that carried them had to be snapped, or tattooed inside the bottom lip of Dark Matters operatives. Now it is just hanging out there over everybody’s heads, almost a neon white against the grey bodies of the ships. 

“Do you mean the Dark Matters logo?”

“Yeah.”

Jet nods “I thought that might be the blood loss.”

“Fuck. Kanagawas and Dark Matters. Uh, fuck, Jet, we need to get out of here.”

“I agree.” he drops the curtain “But we’re going to have a much harder time of it than I had hoped.”

“What do you think? A quarantine or scorched earth?” 

“Scorched earth isn’t Dark Matters’ usual modus operandi, but-” he grits his teeth and stops, doubling up over his wounded arm. 

Juno crouches with him “What?”

“I- there was shock, before. Adrenaline. Holding most of it back. It’s wearing off.”

“Ok. Do you need a minute?”

Blood flows along the slope of Jet’s wrist. Drops pool and drip from his fingers.

“We don’t have time. This is just going to get worse.”

A crash from the porch. Soup stumbles in with a giant piece of piping and waves it like a sword “Lookit how tall!”

“Honey, can you make sure you’re staying inside, please? And being quiet.”

Soup nods, then picks up one of the few frames that is still intact and attempts to hit it like a baseball. 

“Let’s assume we’ve got until the end of the day to get out of here. That gives us about three or four hours until it’s dark. What do you think? Private ship would get blocked if they haven’t already been burned.”

“Even if we were to find a private vehicle, they would catch us. These are recreational or else high-performance sports ships.”

“What’s wrong with those?”

“Nothing, Juno, provided you don’t mind to exploding the moment it passes out of the atmosphere. We wouldn’t be able to get out into space, much less cross the deep-space between us and the CB.”

Juno can’t help but grin “Ok, ace-pilot, what about Dark Matters ships?”

“Dark Matter ships are equipped with return protocols. If someone without the right level of clearance attempts to touch any of the steering equipment, the ship shuts down and returns to its base or mothership of origin. And yes, Juno, I know this because I have tried to hijack a variety of them.” Jet glances at Soup to make sure she isn’t paying attention. “Out of the seven attempts I made it worked only once and that was because I’d chopped the woman’s hands off and used them to touch the controls.”

“What the hell? Why?”

“I was in my twenties. You know what those are like.” 

“Eh, fair enough. I had two septum piercings when I was 24.”

“At any rate, I’d say our best options are either taking a hostage or stowing away in a container.”

“You really wanna shut us up in a dark, enclosed space with a traumatised cultist Martian?”

“Point.”

“Hey! Stop whispering! There’s some guys on the street, they’re gonna hear you!” 

Thankfully, Soup has the common sense to drop her weapon and crawl into the living room after she stops shouting. She scuttles over the broken glass and parts the curtains slightly. Calling them ‘guys’ was very generous of her. Juno would have said ‘aberration’, or just screamed. The cultist slithers by too fast for Juno to recognise who it might be. All that remains to prove that was ever a human is a torso mounted on the back or top of the Martian body. The way their head bops back and forth would suggest they’re unconscious, but the body is moving. Something that blubbery has no right to be so fast.  
Close behind the cultist-Martian is a vehicle that Juno, in his experience, would call a convertible tank. It’s an open-air thing with fat tyres and a lot of armoured people hanging out of its frame, shouting at each other and the Martian. An enormous gun is mounted above the windshield and trembles like a taut guitar string with the movement of the tank- clearly, it was added to the vehicle as an afterthought. It’s like seeing a golf-cart with a machine gun taped to its roof. 

“Dark Matters?”

The Martian has reached the end of the street and tries to make the turn. Their momentum is too great and carries them into the yard and porch of the house in front of them. The Martian barely feels it; tentacle limbs propel it frantically along and over the splintery ruins and out of site. The tank tears after it, its tyres skidding a few metres on a slick of yellowish blood. 

“The Kanagawas’ militia, too, I would think.”

“Cousin Min said for mom an’ us to leave before they all got here.” offers Soup “The soldier people. She said it was gonna get messy. Are they kidnappin’ everyone?”

“I’m afraid they may be, yes.”

“Aw, narts.” Soup pats Jet on the leg as if to comfort him “I’m sure they won’t wanna kidnap you guys. Mom says Cousin Min wants to make something to help everybody be healthy forever, an’ you, Jet, you’re half dead.”

“Thanks Soup. You be sure to point that out to the people if they try for me.”

“Those guns, they can’t be for shooting bullets.” Juno whispers to Jet.

“Stunners, maybe.”

“Those will kill us if they hit us.”

“I think we’ll be alright. They’re difficult to aim even when they are installed properly. This is a slap-dash operation, if all their vehicles are like that.”

“I think we caused this.” Juno’s hand drifts to the corner of the briefcase on his back “I think I caused this. I think- I must smell like a Martian because of the tech I used to have-”

“Stop that or I’m telling Rita.”

Juno shuts up. 

Their best bet, at this point, is also the stupidest bet. So hostage-taking it is, which will mean approaching a ship in the process of abducting, loading or returning a crazed semi-Martian cultists to the mothership while Juno gives a genuine Martian a piggyback. This could go wrong in so many ways.  
The alternative is waiting around to be discovered by the Dark Matters/Kanagawas, or for a rescue that will end up even more dangerous to attempt. By now, the Carte Blanche knows their boys are in trouble. Even if Rita wasn’t around to glance in on the surveillance networks and observe the chaos on the ground, the fact they’ve missed two of their scheduled check-ins is enough to merit an extraction. Maybe if it was just the two of them and Jet wasn’t so mangled, they would stay put. 

But the kid. The kid and the Martian, and the knife making steady progress to bone. There is just no time. 

Juno is the first out the door. He’s got no weapon, a kid and a wedding band that matches Jet’s. Anyone’s first assumption would be that they are a family. That’s what Juno will plead if they’re stopped. Until then- they’ll just walk with a purpose, the way he walked through the dicier corners of Old-town when it was dark and the buses had stopped. Just move like you’re late for an appointment with God Herself and 70% of people will leave you be. 

The moment she comes off the porch, Soup gets nervous. She blinks in the smoke, her eyes growing wide. Her home is on fire. 

“Will you hold my hand?” says Jet.

Soup has to take several deep breaths before she can answer “M’not scared.”

“I am.”

She grabs Jet’s hand and stays close to him. 

This street is empty. Each house is cracked and crushed in the same way as Nadeing’s, meaning the first few Martians wrought as much destruction as possible, or all of the cultists’ transformations began at the same time. 

This street is empty, now. The next is not. It is hard to tell where a noise is coming from, what, with the upper tiers bouncing a sound back almost the moment it’s made, so the fact that it sounded like someone was dying on the next street didn’t necessarily mean that someone was. But this is not a trick of the acoustics. 

The first transformed cultist they saw must have made that extreme turn after finding their way blocked, unexpectedly, by the bruise-coloured mass that lays across the length of the street. Screened by the colourful tree-tops, a human face wheezes at its apex, apparently struggling around an enormous growth that has unspooled from their mouth to almost reach the ground. The creature is almost nothing but fat. A few nubby limbs protrude from the folds but fall far short of the ground. They can’t move. The slick of blood that went out of Nadeing’s hallway ends beneath the creature, too, which fills Juno with a brief and evil glee.  
He regrets this all the more when he sees that, of the figures chattering and yelling at the creatures’ base, the only plain-clothes among them is actually Nadeing. 

So she did not get very far after all.

“-hurting her!” Nadeing has put herself between the creature and one of the armoured people.  
They’ve got this immense tool that looks kind of like a dental drill under one arm and each of the troops behind them has got something equally over-sized and bladed. Looks like Cecil Kanagawa’s toy-chest.

“We can’t leave her here! Look, lady, she’s going to heal, we’ve seen it already. Either she smothers to death under her own flesh folds or you move the fuck out of the way and let me do my job.”

Juno glances back at Jet and knows they have come to the same conclusion about those tools.

Soup is staring down the street at the creature and the crowd and the woman that she was afraid of, but Jet turns her, gently, and says “Why don’t you put those headphones on?”

Nadeing continues to shout. It’s lucky for them- she’s drawing all the attention, so that the three of them are able to walk brazenly down the sidewalk, as much as the rubble will allow. Juno cannot make himself look back. He cannot make himself stop listening either. 

“-my daughter alone! Kayrrine can fix this! You just have to talk to Kayrrine- she’s called Takagi, but she’s also a Kanagawa and she knows us! Please, just, let me call her!”

“Won’t do you good. Dark Matters blocked all out-going comms calls starting this morning and that blanket covers all domestic comms calls as well. You can’t talk to anyone unless you’re standing in front of ‘em.” the sound of a chrome blade beginning to spin. A small choir of hydraulics and neat engines coming to life. 

“Just- just take her the way she is! She can fit. She can squish in or fold up or something-”

“Or nothing! We only have the one container size. Now move the fuck over.”

Nadeing yells. Her words are made indistinct by the distance and the other sounds, the sounds of the same thing happening to a dozen other people. Her voice cuts off. Too fast to be of her own will.  
And then the blades are quieted as the touch flesh. A new set of lungs begins to scream. 

“This is definitely Dark Matters.” says Jet, at the same time that Juno says “This is definitely the Kanagawas.”

Juno laughs. He hates how his voice shakes “Maybe it’s both of them.”

“I think we may be in over our heads.”

A tentacle falls across the sidewalk- rolling from the a house and dragging a good bit with it. Jet grabs Soup by the collar and lifts her clean over it. He jumps over the twitching appendage with no trouble. Juno needs a running start and has to take a knee, narrowly missing a puddle of glass.

“Then again, I am quite tall by Spacer standards.” 

“Are you telling me that you’re short for an Earthling?”

“Sure. My proportions are more Juno-ish that Peter-ish, if you like.”

There is a crack like thunder. With another, louder exclamation a fat-trunked frangipani smashes into the street and sprays surveillance birds in all directions. The transformed Martian that did it struggles within the branches. They have been impaled in six places that Juno can see.  
With a whimper, Soup hides her face in Jet’s side. 

“Shit!” a trooper comes around the side of the cracked trunk “Great! Get the cutting stuff, we’ve-” they freeze, seeing the three of them. Juno assumes. Hard to tell with the blacked-out visors. 

The trooper recovers quickly “Civilians! M, J, we’ve got civilians! Bring the cuffs!”

Juno’s stomach drops. At least they haven’t recognised him or Jet “Wait, what the hell? You don’t need to cuff us!”

Four or five more of them. One of them has got a few pairs of heavy-duty cuffs slung over their shoulder, like, heavy enough to be hand-me-downs from the solar war. 

The first of them acts as if they have not heard Juno. They begin to delegate “Alright, E, M2, you guys get up in the tree and start peeling that fat fuck out of there. J, M, you guys help me with the civs. The big one looks like he’s starting to go already.”

What, do they think Jet’s arm started to transform and he cut it off to stop it? 

J is the biggest of the handful and so takes it upon themselves to approach, their rifle swinging in one hand “Let go of the kid.”

“Now hold on,” Jet takes a step back “Explain what you want to do with us.”

“You’re not in a position to be asking questions, man. Just be glad that we’re taking you people off the streets. M, give me one of the cuffs. The biggest pair we have. Krishna and Jesus, we would have to be the ones that find an Earthling.”

“I’d advise that you don’t try to touch me.” Jet nudges Soup back into Juno’s arms “I am not in a good mood.”

The first of them laughs “Oh, ok, big guy. Sorry. I didn’t know we were dealing with a hard man here. Now is not the time to try to, fucking, prove yourself in front of your kid and your wife.”

Juno can see by the set of Jet’s shoulders that he’s going to start swinging in a second. And he can see how it’s going to go. And he hates what Jet wants him to do, what Jet has told him to do just by handing the kid over. 

Slowly, Juno swings the briefcase around so that it’s on his front. He pistol-squats and has Soup climb onto his back.

The first trooper peers past Jet “Ma’am, you need to stop moving.” 

“Go on. I’ll find you in a minute.” says Jet. 

Trooper J is within arm’s reach of him “Cuff him to fucking what, genius? His arm’s hanging off.”

“To yourself!” snaps the first one “I don’t give a shit, just get them contained.”

They start to move past Jet, towards Juno.

“I’m not gonna cuff him to me if he’s about to go all blobby!”

“Then get him to a fucking container and cuff him to that! Rama and Sita, do I have to do all your thinking for you?”

“Three hours.” says Juno “I won’t leave without you.” 

“Ma’am,” says the trooper “Ma’am, put the kid down. The faster you and your husband comply the faster we can all go home-”

Jet’s fist smashes into their solar plexus. Even through the armour it winds them. They slacken, wheezing, and this limpness makes them an ideal projectile for Jet. Juno has seen him do this before- pick up a grown person by the arm, swing them around and toss them like a discus. Never seen him do it one-armed, though. 

“Jet just threw a guy.” says Soup.

“Yeah, he does that.” Juno starts to run “Don’t look back, honey.”

Where is Juno going? Why is Juno going at all? He doesn’t even have a driver’s license, let alone the expertise to hijack a ship and take it into orbit. He should have made Jet hold the kid and take a knee, done the fighting himself. Against five heavily armed and armoured troopers. Yeah, ok, not on his best days- but! Maybe he should turn back! Stuff Soup and the Martian in a corner and come back for them as soon as he and Jet have taken care of business.  
The further away Juno gets the more elaborate the scenarios grow. He can see the fires, now. Ash and scraps of fire flow from the sides of the second-tier, thickening the air to the point that Soup struggles to breathe. The air quality is about the same as Hyperion City on a clear day so Juno is fine to keep running. But the heat. It’s getting hot in here. Did The Platonium’s engineers build this place with ventilation and cooling systems that can stand up to an out-of-control fire, or did they assume that one would never grow to this size?  
Best laid plans and all that shit.

The transformed are getting thicker on the ground. On every other street, one or two of them struggle in the ruins of crushed homes or else flee clumsily from groups of troopers. A few of them have protesting family members who have managed to hang onto their humanity. They have no more success getting between the tools and their Martianised family members than Nadeing did with her daughter.  
Once, Juno has to slow to a walk as they come to a road that is completely blocked off by a caravan of medical vehicles. The backs are open like ambulances. Pairs of troopers carry people on stretchers. Parts of them, sometimes. So many of the faces are covered with bits of cloth; jackets that must have been taken off the body itself, a piece of curtain, a bedsheet. Some of the civilians have to be dragged to the vehicles. The more lucid among the strugglers gnash and threaten the troopers, but none of them attempt to escape. These people already know they are defeated. 

Although Juno is certain they will be stopped here, there is no choice but to thread through the wounded and the jury-rigged ambulances. All other routes are impassable. He does his HC-after-dark walk and prays and for some goddamned reason it works. It works right up until Juno has reached the very end of the street and someone calls to him- softly, though, and by his own name.

“Juno.” 

Nureyev, coming around the side of a house with its roof in pieces around them.

“Hey,” Juno looks down at his chest where the Martian’s briefcase is hanging “Stop that. I told you, not his face.”

Nureyev stops just in front of him “Juno, dear, I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I assure you I am real.”

Juno pauses. He considers the man in front of him. Then he puts Soup down, hands her the Martian and sweeps his partner up into a crushing hug. Briefly, he brings Nureyev off his feet. Nureyev hangs on and, when he gets the opening, kisses Juno so hard it makes his eye water. 

“Aw, ew.” says Soup. 

Juno puts Nureyev back on his feet “How are you here?”

“Ruby. Ruby and I came to get you. Here, come out of sight… uh, I see you’ve made a friend.”

Ruby chirrups with relief and happiness when Juno comes around the back. This is short-lived as she realises that Jet is not with him. 

No point in trying to soften the blow “He made us go ahead.”

“Ahead to where?”

Opening the back-door, Juno puts the briefcase on one seat and buckles Soup into the other “I don’t know. We just- we were stopped and I guess he was worried they were going to start shooting.”

“By ‘they’, you mean,” Nureyev gestures overhead “Dark Matters?”

“Yeah. We’ve got a real Martian with us.”

Nureyev glances at Soup “This one has chosen to be a little girl? Interesting tactic. It provokes a protective instinct, of course-”

“No, you yutz, in the briefcase!”

“Ah. Close enough. Right, you get in the car and wait here. I’ll be back with Jet in a moment.”

His heart sinks. He was afraid Nureyev was going to say that “Uh, alone? I don’t think so. You haven’t even got your glasses on. Why can’t we look for him with Ruby?”

“Because just getting here almost got us caught. Her cloaking is only so good against this number of scanners. Besides, how many seven-foot Earthlings with grey hair are there here?”

“Nureyev-”

“That’s not your blood, Juno, is it?”

Juno’s front is horrifying. A smock of blood, from his chest to his knees “He took a beating for me. Not a beating, exactly, but I’m sure he’s got whiplash.”

That makes Nureyev smile “Did he do that thing he does to make interrogators feel better about themselves? Turning his head a bit?”

“Then a professional got to him. They cut him, stabbed him, left the fucking knife in him like his arm was a fucking sheath. I had to bandage around him. That’s why I’m covered in blood.”

“Shit. Alright. Juno, get in the car. Stay with the child and your Martian.”

“You’re not even going to ask about the Martian, huh?”

“I trust you. If you’re carrying a Martian about like a infant in a baby-björn then I am sure you have a good reason.”

Ruby whistles with impatience, urging Nureyev on.

He raps her hood “I’m going! Don’t nag. And don’t let Juno stay here if it gets dangerous. The Carte Blanche isn’t far behind-”

“I’m not going to leave you!”

“Juno.”

“Nureyev, I’m not-”

Very softly: “Juno, please. Listen to me. I trust you when you turn up with a Martian and a nine-year-old. Can you trust me when I say that you need to leave without us, if things go sideways?”

“Yeah but I don’t wanna.” God, he sounds petulant. Almost four years later and he’s still a child tantruming in a supermarket.

“I love you.” another kiss. Nureyev’s goodbye kiss. Juno hates it and he hates Nureyev a little bit “I’ll be back.”

Soup gags “Every time you guys kiss my life gets shorter!”

And he’s off, in his house-slippers, without his glasses, and Juno has to let him go.

(Jet)

How many litres of blood does the human body contain? Jet used to know the number off the top of his head. He would recite it during beat-downs or interrogations to intimidate his marks. A torturer with a good knowledge of the human body surely also knows how to weaponize that. What was it, nine? Ten?  
Jet’s forgotten. He is, however, certain that most of the blood that started out in his body today is now on the ground. Painted over The Platonium. 

God. Three, four, five…makes twenty-nine people. Sorry, Rita. Twenty-nine may be too much for her to forgive. Too much for Jet to forgive when he’s got the time and energy to think about it. Assuming that he doesn’t die, here, lightyears from home with some yahoo’s knee pinning him by the chest to the ground.

“It is the Unnatural Disaster. I’m sure of it”

Dark Matters or the Kanagawas, or whoever these jackasses are, discovered him a few moments ago. Lead back to him by the one trooper he didn’t finish off. Getting slow, Unnatural. Earthlings aren’t supposed to peak before their 40’s.  
They discovered Jet slumped against the tree-trunk where the Martian is still impaled, their struggles weakening. He was out of it. Focussed only on keeping pressure on his wound which he’d had to re-open, destroying Juno’s careful work, by taking the knife out and putting it through the throat of the last of the troopers who just wouldn’t go down. Jet found an opening between the chest-piece and the helmet and went for it, the way YJ used to pry open the shell of a boiled lobster with his pen knife. He forgot how easy it is to kill with a knife. Who was it that he last killed with a knife? Buddy will remember. He did it in her defence- that much he knows. 

At any rate Dark Matters has found him and they won’t shut up about it now. 

“How are you sure of it?”

“How are you not? His wanted poster was tacked up on every public noticeboard for fifteen years. Look at him. That’s him.”

“I thought the Unnatural Disaster had black hair.”

“That was a stream-actor, dumbass. Learn to separate fiction from reality.”

Jet cannot see who is standing over him. He is only sure that they are there because he can feel their breath and their shadows dropped over his body. He is getting cold. Tired. He wishes they would shut up. Let him have his last moments in peace. 

“Hey. Hey, Unnatural. What’s his name, Josh or something.”

“Josh? John? Josh or John Sikuliaq, hello? Can you hear us?”

From further off: “Commander! Mrs Kanagawa says to save him! She wants him brought to Hoosegow.”

“Aw, fuck, really? Christ. Ok. I don’t know if we’ve got a stretcher in this guy’s size.”

“Respectfully, commander, make him stand up.”

“I’m gonna respect my boot right up your ass if you don’t watch your tone.”

Jet feels a tug at his good arm. These people are trying his patience. They want him to stand up, really? They can’t be content with letting him marinate in blood until death finds him? Fine. Dying in the back of a Dark Matters prison van is just as good as dying on the ground. Either way, it will be what he deserves. 

Mustering the last ounces of strength in his body, Jet smacks the hand away and stands up on his own. 

“Holy shit.” 

His body protests. His wounded arm threatens to drop off at the joint of his elbow. Do it, Jet thinks, if you’re going to whine so much.

At last, the world comes back into focus. The commander and their dozen troops milling about, poking at the Martian’s body or else abusing the jammed gun attached to their ludicrous golf-carts. All of them have stopped to watch him. Some go as far to lift their tinted visors. Scarred faces. The faces of war veterans. 

“My name is Jet.”

“Huh?” says the commander.

“Not Josh.”

“Oh. My bad.” she pushes her visor up “You’re not gonna make me cuff you, are you, Jet?”

“Mr Sikuliaq.”

The commander laughs “Mr Sikuliaq, then, come with me. I’m gonna take you just over there, to our medical truck, and our boys are gonna patch you up. Not gonna lie, now, it won’t be pleasant. It’ll be fast as shit actually, because the people I work for-”

“Dark Matters.” 

“Fuck! Yeah, ok, I guess you would know- look, we’re going to lock this place down and do a clean up from orbit. Do you know what that means? I just hope you haven’t got people here. It won’t be pleasant.”

She begins to guide Jet by the arm over to a slightly less ridiculous vehicle with an opened back. A pale-faced doctor opens up a med kit, preparing to tend to him with an expression of sublime regret. The doctor is clearly berating herself for the choices that lead her to this moment. Jet too.

The commander makes him sit. Jet’s head spins. The doctor daubs at his wound with an antiseptic that would sting, if Jet’s nerves weren’t already so pain-fried. He can’t feel it. 

The troopers are talking again.

“It’s a civilian. Don’t shoot. Xer, you’ll have to come with us. This whole area is unsafe-” 

“Not a civilian.” 

It couldn’t be. 

The man’s smile is sharp and bitter “I’m here to turn myself in. You’ve caught my accomplice, you see, and I’m quite unable to continue without him.”

No way in hell could he pull this off. Jet picks his head up.

The commander’s eyes have grown to the size of dinner-plates.

“Remember me, Agent F?”

“Rex Glass!” cries the commander, raising her rifle “You traitorous motherfucker!”

Lord God in heaven. Jet doesn’t even want to know how Pakak has ended up in front of him, bare-faced and undisguised except for the alias. He suspects he wouldn’t believe the story anyway. Pakak catches his eyes and grins all the wider.

“The one and only. Tell me, how did Agent W make up for that death mask getting stolen? I’ve thought many times about following up on that.”

The commander, Agent F, turns her rifle’s laser up to its highest non-fatal setting “Get on the ground right fucking now.”

Pakak is kneeling before she can finish the order “No need to be crass about it. I’m coming along quietly to- hm, I would have thought it was the DM headquarters, but I’ve seen far too many Kanagawas for my taste.”

The agents approach Pakak like they’d approach a bear with blood on its muzzle. The one who does put the cuffs on him is shaking so hard they have to try three times before the cuffs lock into place. Agent F has no fear of him- she is just mad. Seizing his arm, she wrenches him up and over to the truck, to Jet.

“Do you know this man?”

“Yes.” Jet grunts as the stitch-gun touches his arm “As he said. Rex is my accomplice.”

Agent F’s face darkens “Move over, medic, this guy’s coming with us. Both of you are going to Hoosegow.”

Gamely, Pakak hops into the back of the truck and climbs over the doctor, whose expression suggests she is on the verge of a heart-attack “Oh, charming. Hyperion City has such wonderfully smoggy sunsets at this time of year.”

Jet stares at him in askance.

“What? I couldn’t let you go in alone, could I?”

“You could.”

Pakak shrugs “I didn’t want to, then. No need to worry about the package, by the way. I sent it off before I came. They should be fine.”

Relief is warm in Jet’s stomach “Mad as hell, I imagine.”

From overhead, there is a sound like rusty hinges and thunder. Smoke-muffled and horrible, the noise continues around them, spurring the troopers into frantic action. It must be The Platonium’s storm-shutters beginning to close. To seal the place off from the outside world. Soon, Dark Matters will have their people and their captives off the ground. Everything will have returned to the motherships and, soon, to Mars. As to The Platonium and those that haven’t been brought along in the ships- well, Jet doesn’t want to think about what the inevitable controlled explosion will be like. A selfish part of him is glad that he won’t have to see it nor think about it.

Pakak is here. From what he said, Jet assumes that Juno has left The Platonium by now. The Ruby7 is out there, invisible in the smoke, carrying him and the kid and the Martian to safety.  
Which means Jet can relax.

Pakak gets very little warning- just enough time to catch Jet’s head so it doesn’t bounce off the floor. Sighing, Pakak moves so that Jet’s head is pillowed in his lap. 

“Keep going, doctor. That wasn’t the Reaper. Jet has this tendency to pass out or fall asleep when he doesn’t want to deal with something.”

A moment later, the doors of the truck are shut on the end of the world. Pakak and Jet are trapped inside, bound for Hoosegow, but at least Jet’s bleeding has stopped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Looks like Jet and Nureyev are going on a boys' trip. That should be nice.


	12. I told you she was a 'she'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: references to a character's canonical psychosis, mentions of loss of a parent, mentions of industrial accident, mentions of fainting, reference to a large fire, gore, blood, medical procedures, animal eating stuff that falls off the table from said medical procedures, mentions of drug use, emotional manipulation, threats, references to Hell, strong language
> 
> Suggested listening: Arcade Fire, 'Everything Now'

Almost two years ago, the inspiration for this current misadventure came to Buddy as she watched Vespa weather the first of many psychotic episodes in her presence. Vespa warned her, in her own way. She did not yet have the exact language to describe what had been done to her brain by radiation and trauma’s meeting with some latent family malady, and what her world now looked and sounded like. She had told Buddy that her mind was going to “come and go”, which Buddy took as a poetic description of something simpler like dissociation.  
And then she watched Vespa address an empty chair as if it were her father for about fifteen minutes. She was telling him to go home. Get back in your grave, Baba, I’m home now. You can’t keep following me around. 

Vespa must have thought she was not speaking aloud, because she was surprised when Buddy cautiously engaged; was Vespa alright?  
Vespa shook her head, telling Buddy that the only thing to be done was be patient while she got herself ‘under control’. Over those slow first days when it was becoming apparent that Vespa’s hallucinations were a permanent change in her brain chemistry, the idea came to Buddy with equal dread and inevitability. 

The night Buddy started putting her ideas down, she did so in the kitchen, in the middle of the night, because she couldn’t sleep and her insomniac episode might as well be put to some use. Poor Jet turned on the kitchen light and found his friend hunching wraith-like over the counter with a conspiracy theorist’s scribblings scattered over some napkins. She said “We’re going to find the cure-mother prime, Jet.” 

He had the courtesy to nod as if this were the most sensible idea in the world, got himself a glass of orange juice and leave her to her machinations.

She had a crazy idea and ran with it. And now here she is, in the midst of it all, and here are the consequences, rolling over her doorstep. Relax, Buddy. Breathe. In a few moments you will be laughing about it with the three of them and wonder why you ever doubted their ability to wriggle out of trouble.

But Juno comes back along. Almost alone.

He is a nightmarish vision, smocked with blood, his face blank, his hands steady as he leads a soot-smudged kid into the Carte Blanche and passes an attaché-case to Vespa.

“They need help.” is all he can say.

Rita plunges to the ground. Juno’s senses come back to him in time to prevent her from face-planting into the ground. She revives a few seconds later, pale and beginning to sweat, and manages to gasp out that she thought Jet and Peter had been shredded in their efforts to get Juno off the satellite and Juno, crazed by grief, had scooped their earthly remains into the first thing he’d found. 

“Nah,” says Juno “It’s a Martian.”

Juno has brought back Jet’s knife. An ‘ulu’, the blade of which is curved as an axe-blade with a short bone-handle attached like the spine to a book. Jet stole it from his sister Emanoraq on the day he left Utqiagvik and has been using it to cut his hair and enemies ever since. The grim ceremony of accepting this token of her missing friend reminds Buddy of the day her father died.  
Juno looks exactly like the farm-hand who came up on the porch down to the bloody clothes and the hang-dog expression. Unable to meet her eyes as he surrendered the last earthly good of the man that had just been ripped from Buddy’s life. In her father’s case, it was a helmet crushed at the right temple where the fatal wound was dealt and the leather cord on which his hannunvaakuna had hung for as long as Buddy had been alive. 

By all rights the charm should have been passed down to Sportti. Sportti was the eldest. Actually, Champ was the eldest, but he would not have appreciated the token as much as his sisters, and would have damaged it by attempting to eat it. Buddy took it for herself and lied when Sportti asked if Isi’s necklace had ever made it back to them.

“I never got a chance to use it.” Juno said “I forgot I even picked it up. At least I didn’t burn it when the house went up.”

Buddy took the ulu with one hand. The other hovered over the hannunvaakuna tucked into her bosom. She felt as if her father and her sister were laughing at her. Mocking her: go on, Buddi. See if you can get that knife on the necklace too. 

“Thank you for bringing this back.” she says “We will give it back to Jet sooner rather than later, darling, you mark my word…now when you say Martian…”

“I mean a Martian.”

And he won’t elaborate.

Buddy does not have time to press him because her comms have begun ringing. Her burner comms, specifically. She takes herself off to the side while Juno opens the case and shows Vespa something that makes her scream. 

“To whom am I-” Buddy is interrupted by a voice she hasn’t heard in a while, so long, in fact, that she is not certain of whom it belongs to until the caller confirms their name.

“Buddy Aurinko? They’re taking him to Hoosegow. Min Kanagawa just put out a warning on the bounty networks that no one should try for Sikuliaq’s head. She said she’ll turn her militia on anyone who tries to take him to the governments that want him, like Jupiter and Neptune.”

“How do you know this?”

“You recognise my voice? It’s February Aisling, remember? Jet helped me transport a few bounties through Outer-Rime territory after I had that blow-out with Quaoar’s despot. Look, the Kanagawa son has been killing people on live TV for years now. Archaeology is only going to divert his interest for so long. I wouldn’t be surprised if your man ending up in Hoosegow reminds Cecil how much he likes killing people. But if it ever comes up, don’t tell anybody that I told you about the bounty thing. Just- just try to get to him quick, Buddy, or it’s going to go badly for him.”

He is gone before Buddy can press him for details- for his contacts, his reasons for sticking his neck out and whose anger he risks by doing so.  
Peeling herself out of the corner, Buddy sees the attaché-case has been shut and Rita is slack in Juno’s arms again. 

Buddy makes herself breathe “Are you hurt, Juno?”

“No. This isn’t my blood.”

“I’ve just been told that Jet is apparently going to Hoosegow. Does that sound right to you?”

Juno shrugs “I wouldn’t know. Peter went off to get him, but they didn’t come back. The shutters started to close over the sky and Ruby made me get in. She drove us off. She wouldn’t let me look for them. I guess that could be right.”

“Aw, geez,” Rita has come back around “You gotta warn a gal before ya show ‘em somethin’ like that, Mistah Steel.”

Putting the case on her back like a bag, Vespa is crouched with the kid, now, checking her over for obvious wounds or signs of serious shock, while the kid chatters about how cool it was to drive through the blockade and how not a one of the ships around them noticed that the car was there.

Not long after La Charladora had been seen off with bruised hench-nephews/nieces and a promise to bury Buddy’s operation shouted from the cockpit of her retreating ship, the Carte Blanche followed Ruby to the edge of The Platonium’s territory. In the less than hour and a half it had taken to get after the car and Peter playing the gallant, the space around the satellite was thronged with other ships; the rest of the universe had caught on that something was wrong on The Platonium.  
Vehicles of every kind- emergency response, Trojan and Greek commuter shuttles that had been held up, the private ships of concerned parties who must have also lost contact with their people here, ships with the colours of local news-streaming stations. None of them were being allowed forwards. Even the emergency response units that were responding to the distress calls from neighbouring settlements were blocked. 

Just for the sake of thoroughness, Rita hacked into the communication feeds of one of the ER vehicles. A frantic lieutenant was trying to get the attention of the ships. Their hails were bounced back each time with a pre-recorded message that the situation was under control and that all ‘civilian personnel’ should either maintain their distance or go home. As if these ships belonged to the solar government- except they definitely did not.  
The blockade was composed of a series of shield-nets that would bounce back any ship foolish enough to charge them and patrolled by a handful of fat, clunky ships that had obviously just limped out of a war-time drydock for the occasion. Among them, the sleek ships of a billionaire’s militia passed out of the simulated atmosphere to the bigger ships’ bellies, each pulling a cargo container. 

The Carte Blanche is still out among them. On the fringe, so as to make a quick escape if it became necessary. 

For the past three hours, they haven’t been able to do much. Rita hacked her way into the surveillance system. With the way things were going she did not worry about being caught by their security- there were bigger problems on the ground. By the time she got in, there wasn’t much to see. A lot of the cameras had been knocked out either on purpose, by the militia, or broken in the chaos that descended on the place. Thick sheets of smoke further obfuscated their view. The three of them (and Guapo, puddled at Rita’s feet) spent a long time cycling through the same dozen frames of fire, of houses broken open and vague, bloody figures drifting in and out of view, pursued by troopers or fled from. Some were human. Some did not appear human, but Buddy hesitated to label them as the ‘Martians’ that La Charladora mentioned.  
The idea that alien life was among humans in this way was hard to process, especially when Buddy’s mind was preoccupied with the safety of her crew. She would save her existential crisis for later. She would also give the Martians the benefit of the doubt; the inhuman figures clearly provoked some fear in their human counterparts, but if these Martians had indeed been held captive and harvested from to produce the cure-mother prime, then were they not within their rights in sowing a bit of terror?

In her pocket, the comms buzzes again. Buddy ignores it “Whose child is that, Juno?”

“Her name’s Soup.”

Soup turns to Buddy and gives her a gap-toothed grin “My moms abandoned me an’ my nanny got all big an’ almost crushed me.”

Buddy points at her “Juno, did you kidnap a child?”

“Nu-uh, I kidnapped them! I climbed through Juno an’ Jet’s window an’ I said, ‘take me away from this hellhole or I’m gonna find a way ta haunt ya without dying!’ an’ they listened. Jet made me listen to his old-dude music when everythin’ went blobby.”

From down the hallway, there is the sound of one of Buddy’s other burner comms ringing. 

“She asked for help, Buddy.” Juno helps Rita to her feet “And I couldn’t tell her no.”

“Help from Child Services, Juno! We are not Child Services! We are a pack of criminal outlaws!”

“She’s fine.” Vespa pats Soup on the shoulder “You did good, uh, getting out of there without dying. Nice work…kiddo. My name is Vespa, and I’m the doctor here, so you let me know if you start feeling sick.”

“Juno!” 

“Buddy!” he retorts “One of her mothers was Takagi Kayrrine! It didn’t feel like a good idea to leave her at that woman’s mercy, ok?”

Buddy is about to start cussing when Vespa catches her eyes, shakes her head. Vespa exudes this aura of certainty that immediately calms Buddy down. 

Vespa shoulders the case, standing “Ok, Juno, so you’re absolutely sure that Peter and Jet were caught?”

“I- it sounds like that’s what Buddy’s being told, so, yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me. There were Dark Matters people all over the ground. They had these weapons, these things that looked like left-overs from the war.”

“Dark Matters?” Vespa sighs through her nose “Yeah, ok. Ok. I thought I recognised those logos. So it’s Dark Matters and the Kanagawas. Ok, so that probably means that the information Buddy got is right.”

“So we intercept ‘em, right?” says Rita “Before they get the boys to Hoosegow?”

Vespa shakes her head “I’m gonna guess those ships are guarded heavier than the Utgard Express at the moment. Right now, Rita, we need to get away from this. Can you go up to the cockpit and drive us a ways out? Not to the same place that La Charladora’s people found us, but not too far away. We need time to think and this guy in the case needs some serious medical help. Buddy, can you think of anything else?”

Thank the various gods for Vespa Ilkay. From the minute Ruby let herself into the garage, Vespa hasn’t missed a beat; she has confirmed Juno and the kid are fine, taken on an apparent Martian as a patient without complaint, and now she’s having to take over on delegating because Buddy is frozen dumb to the spot, unsure of how to react to everything that’s hitting her. Meanwhile Buddy has been about as useful as Guapo, who crawled under the kitchen table when Juno came in and has been wheezing under there. If whatever the hell kind of animal Guapo is can dissociate then, going by the glaze over his many eyes, that’s what he’s doing.  
Vespa Ilkay is a gift. Buddy wants a divorce so she can propose and marry the woman all over again. 

“Ah.” says Buddy.

“Why don’t you go get your comms, Bud? I hear it ringing. Here, Rita, can you give Buddy something to write on? I think it’s gonna be another tip-off.”

And so Buddy stumbles into her bedroom, armed with a pink kitty-eared notepad and a gel pen. Three of the seven burner comms in her desk are now ringing.

Buddy picks up the first one she sees “Yes?”

“Buddy Aurinko? This is Tsegaye Yan- you and your Earthling helped me six months back with a mediation. Do you remember that?”

Another smuggler who got caught under-cutting the Devereauxs’ medical monopoly. Buddy convinced the Devereauxes to let Tsegaye Yan live, on the grounds that she’d stop now and because Papa Devereaux owed Buddy a favour from about twenty years back.  
“Of course I do.” that was a damn good favour too. Perhaps Buddy should have saved it for a situation like this. What would the world really miss if one smuggler of painkillers and prescriptions went out of it? “Have you got something for me?”

“Well I’m guessing you already know that Dark Matters just got Jet Sikuliaq.”

If all of these people intend to tell Buddy the same thing, she’s going to lose her temper “Yes, I’m aware.”

“He was in a bad way when they picked him up. Mostly dead. He’s been stabilised now, but he’s not going into Hoosegow in the best physical condition. I heard he had some pretty deep, thorough knife wounds in one arm, lost a lot of blood and all.”

The release of tension from her body is so great that Buddy has to grope for her chair “This is going to sound ridiculous, Tsegaye, but do you know what kind of anaesthetic they are using? Come to that, what kind of painkillers?”

“Uh…he used to have that problem with opioids, right? I know he’s got someone with him who’s been raising hell. Maybe about that? I don’t know. You’ve heard of Rex Glass, right?”

Buddy’s mouth grows dry. At least they know where Peter has got to “The Dark Matters traitor?”

“Yeah, him. He gave himself up, Buddy. I have a contact in Dark Matters who was watching it happen on somebody’s head-cam. He just walked right up to them and surrendered himself because they’d caught Jet. Jet’s ace-aro, right?”

“Proudly, yes.”

“Well somebody had better tell Rex Glass, because I’ve never seen anybody do shit like that for someone else if they didn’t love them. Or really, really, really want to get in their pants.”

“Tsegaye, if speculation on Rex Glass’s feelings towards my Jet is all you can offer me then I’m afraid I have to hang up now.”

“Wait! Sorry, wait. I just- I have to go too, actually, but I just wanted you to know that I hope you get him back. Jet’s good people. Even when he was high out of his brain and chopping people’s hands off to hijack ships, he was mostly a good guy. I was happy as hell for him when I heard that he’d gotten clean. I’d hate for all that hard work to get wasted by Dark Matters, you know?”

“Is that why you’re doing this? You’re truly going against Dark Matters and the Kanagawas because you admire Jet’s tenacity?”

Tsegaye is clearly uncomfortable with the question. Afraid she might be overhead, perhaps? That her words will be thrown in her face later on?  
“Lots of reasons, Buddy. I don’t like the way that the big-shots like La Charla and Devereaux decide that we all have to do things their way or get frozen out of business. Some of us got into the underworld because we didn’t like the way things worked in the uh, the over-world, or whatever, and now they’re starting to get hard to tell apart. We’re supposed to operate without these monolithic authorities hanging over us. We’re supposed to steal from Dark Matters, not join up with them.”

“Fair enough. Thank you, Tsegaye. I hope that your reaching out to us doesn’t come back to punish you.”

“Good luck.”

The calls keep coming in like that. Each of the callers make it clear that they are putting a lot on the line by contacting Buddy at all, and will make only the vaguest hints of whom this danger might be from. Noorssen, which isn’t surprising. The Devereauxes. La Charladora. The people whom Buddy has pissed off today and “A lot of their minion groups,” as Chiara Oyeyemi puts it “You pissed off a lot of people with this quest, Buddy. People feel like you’re over-stepping your bounds.”

“The bounds drawn by a shadowy network of anonymous trillionaires that work to keep the rest of the universe in crippling medical debt?”

“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. I think you’re on the right track. My sister’s alive today because Jet told me where our nearest Hanataba was. Guy’s got a lot of goodwill built up- and on that note, have you ever heard of this Rex Glass guy before?”

“Yes. You are not the first person to call today, nor the first person to tell me that I should be worried about Glass’s being trapped with Jet.”

“Oh! Uh, good! Listen, Buddy, one of my contacts in Dark Matters said a picture of him is making the rounds now. People are getting confused because he’s not just Rex Glass- he’s a bunch of other men who are supposed to be dead or reclusive or just don’t exist at all. The crazy thing is that this screengrab off somebody’s headcam is, apparently, the only photo of this guy that exists.”

After a while, Buddy starts to take these names down too.

A smuggler who used to split runs with Jet tells her that Jet’s condition is see-sawing because there is no blood of his type available for a transfusion. An Earthling injected with Spacer blood will just sicken and die faster, he continues, as if Buddy does not know this, but he is sure that Jet can hold on until they reach Hoosegow, which will be in about two days. He’ll be pumped full of sterile coconut water, put into a medical coma and wake up in three days, if luck is on his side. 

“Apparently Rex Glass has been yelling about a tree nut allergy. Is that a code for something?”

“It’s a code for ‘Jet will die of anaphylaxis if he touches a coconut’.”

“Oh. Huh. I thought they were ok if you had a nut allergy.”

“For some. Jet is not one of them.”

“Well I’m sure they can use saline.”

Buddy takes that down.

The next is a hired gun who retired to a ranch with her two wives a few years ago but just so happens to live near the path the transport is projected to take. Jet and Buddy’s involvement piqued her interest, so she reached out to a few old friends still knocking around the Dark Matters system as moles or converts. She informs Buddy that the militia forces have split themselves in half; one as a protective convoy around Jet’s and the other transport units, the other remaining to search for something on the ground level of The Platonium.  
An asset has gone missing. One of a handful of irreplaceably rare assets has just vanished off the face of The Platonium, and an enemy operative along with it. Takagi Kayrrine, the woman in charge of the assets, insists that it was not Rex Glass accompanying Jet Sikuliaq at the beginning of his undercover work. For some reason she identified the mystery lady as Juno Steel, the folk hero of Hyperion City.

“I thought that lady threw himself off a bridge.” is what she leaves Buddy with “Oh, by the way, have you ever heard the name Karelius Yu?”

A doctor-thief relegated to the Devereauxes’ black books for stealing from their organ shipments to supply their Hanataba tells Buddy about a cell in the dead middle of Hoosegow, where the guards’ tower is usually constructed. Jet will be surrounded on all sides and all times by at least a dozen people armed to the back-teeth. By the way, look into the names Perseus Shah and Castro ‘Cat’ Rorschach. 

A fence Buddy used to work with tells her that they’re checking Jet and his companion over for signs of infection. The Platonium was quarantined because of a mysterious, explosive disease that wrought a change on most of those who imbibed the supplement on the regular. They’re going straight into the Kanagawas’ labs. As to that man, try the name Yannis Jade and see where that takes you.

Jet has just been moved to a larger ship within the convoy. Rex Glass wouldn’t be parted from his side and bit several people for attempting to remove him. Look into the name ‘Duke Rose’ and the crash of the Utgard Express.

A courier has just been dispatched from a blood bank with several pints of Earthling stuff, again, with the understanding that Min Kanagawa will feed any and all aggressors to her son’s CameramenTM. Try Paradisio Cuxin. 

A Trojan media outlet just tried to break the story of what is happening on The Platonium, to legitimise the rumblings on social media with a mainstream outlet. The journalist who was pushing the story had their ship boarded by Dark Matters and was warned off trying that shit again, with a shot to the leg and the lens of their cameras. Hidalgo Roman. 

The search on The Platonium for the missing asset has yielded no results, and maintaining the blockade around the place has grown too labour-intensive. The evacuation is as complete as Dark Matters wants it to be. By the end of the day, the evidence will need to be disposed of; ships that are still close to The Platonium will probably be boarded and searched, just in case the asset was passed on to some third party. Carthage Rhys. 

Soon, Buddy has filled a quarter of the notepad with these tips and Peter’s army of aliases. Her hands are smudged with glittery gel from writing so fast and having to turn the pages before the ink dries. Once, Vespa put her head around the door to ask her something and Buddy couldn’t spare a second to respond; she had to flap her hand at Vespa and mouth apologies while jotting down another of Peter’s alleged names. God, she is so fucking mad at Peter right now. Of course he has his right to privacy and to do as he pleases, but Lord, did he have to exercise those rights with so many different names?  
Buddy is going to lose sleep if she lets herself think about the energy one would have to devote to maintaining enough aliases to found a small lunar settlement or a wine-and-cheese club, or both. Buddy usually misses it the first and second time someone calls her ‘Buddicia’ because she forgets that is also her name.

After a certain point, Buddy cannot face hearing all of this on the edge of her own bed. For some reason, it’s obscene to her to have the door open as well so that anyone passing by might hear the conspiracy unspooling through the comms and across Rita’s kitty pad.  
If she hadn’t heard Rita installing the kid, Soup, in Jet’s room, she would have sat on his workbench, or opened his closet and cried on the sleeve of his bomber jacket. He left it behind. It’s a part of the Unnatural’s uniform, the bomber jacket with the pride patches, and so is banished to his closet during under-cover work.  
During each of the four times Jet has gone off under-cover or low-profile since Buddy has known him, she could not resist the clingy impulse to go into his room and sniff his clothes to lessen some of the loneliness. Once, Jet got back a day early and found her laying on the couch with a pillow over her face, listening to his voicemail message on repeat. He was cool about it. He waited to walk out of the room before he broke down laughing.

Having Vespa wrenched away made her more sensitive to even the smallest of losses of her partner, which Jet had very much become. It was obvious to both of them, after Buddy helped to bully Jet through his most painful and (God willing) final detox and Jet let her do it, that whatever happened in their lives after this was going to be shared. They had bonded. It was better to be grateful for the friendship bracelet with which the universe manacled them to each other rather than complicate things by wondering why it had occurred. Would they have even cared for each other if they had not needed help?  
If Jet had not needed the help to get and stay sober- if Buddy hadn’t needed someone to help her out of the hazy twilight of widow’s grief- would they have given each other more than a passing glance?

Buddy’s answer to this: who cares?  
For better or worse, Jet was in her life and she was in his. Jet sold Ruby to put a new eye in Buddy’s head. Buddy gave him a home. That was that. 

Of course, the possibility of Jet being ripped away from her the way Vespa was has occurred to her. She is not in denial. She has confronted the idea many times and attempted to make her peace with it- but usually she has also been a little bit drunk with her emotions bubbling close to the surface.  
Buddy has always been aware that she could lose Jet. Doesn’t make it any easier, now that Jet has been abducted and shipped off to the belly of the Kanagawa beast. At least Juno’s kid is in Jet’s room at the moment. It gives her a reason to stay out of there. Her break-down has been delayed.

So, with an arms-dealer turned guilty post-war philanthropist in her ear, Buddy wanders out of her room and into the neighbouring room: Peter’s. The door is not locked. Peter does not lock it because he does not expect to have his privacy invaded like this, and ordinarily he would be correct. However, these are extenuating circumstances. Buddy cannot start sobbing over her comms while people are trying to help her save her crew-members’ lives. 

Peter’s room is so neat it looks like a hotel room. Two years in here, possibly the longest Peter has ever spent in one place, and Peter still does not know how to use a room. The only personal item that is not tucked away in a drawer is a notebook, open on his desk. Out of curiosity and a rising panic at the amount of information these people are throwing at her, Buddy goes over to the desk and flips the cover open. Perhaps there will be something in here that can help.  
In the back of her head, she’s thinking that perhaps there is something in here that can help her weed out the real aliases from hearsay. But that is not what this is.

Peter keeps a sketchbook. And he is an incredible artist. Buddy starts flipping through before she can tell herself to mind her own business. Because she is distracted by the space-scapes, by a spaceport and an Outer-Rime souk, Buddy is caught off-guard as she answers this next call.  
The fact that is has come through on her personal comms does not alarm her. At this point, Buddy is on autopilot. She could walk over hot coals and not feel it.

However, the sound of this voice brings her back to reality. 

“Hello Buddicia.”

She sighs. Dealing with him twice in the same day? The gods have really got it out for her this week. 

“Hello Rauho.”

There is birdsong behind him. Uncanny, tuneless music produced by the throats of genetically modified birds that are more weapon than decoration. She heard that part of what Noorssen has been up to during this most recent seclusion was designing some type of self-defence drone that was supposed to be impossible to hack, which lead many to believe that whatever he made was going to be organic, like the things that awful little Kanagawa boy made.

“I heard about what happened to Jet.” 

Buddy turns a page and finds her own face staring back at her. Her mouth is open around a debrief or a command. Whatever she was saying, she was pissed off about it.  
“As has half the universe at this point. What are you calling about, then?”

“Just to see if you wanted to talk about things. Right now, there’s a bit of unpleasantness going on at The Platonium. It seems to me that this unpleasantness has your plan dead in the water, Buddy. Why don’t you come by my property on Kiviuq? We can talk about this.”

She is on the next page, too “Talk about what?”  
The drawing is of a quality that compels Buddy to touch the page, confirming that it is only paper and not some kind of reflective surface. Her cybernetic eye has been erased and re-drawn so many times there is an imprint of it on the next page, smudging shadows across the bridge of her nose that Peter has transformed into her scars by weaving a few jagged lines through them. Her hair blooms around her, unbound and mussed from recently waking up: Buddy Aurinko, drawn by a hand that knows her and has come to love her. 

“How to proceed. What you should devote your energy to in the future. You know,” a bird has come closer, perhaps sitting on his knee or shoulder “This project was a bit too ambitious a re-introduction into the criminal world. It was good to have you back. Encouraging, I mean, to have an old-pro return to the game, and with Vespa Ai Ilkay in tow and all.”

Buddy purses her lips “I am glad that you think so. I am, however, confused by your use of the past tense. Do you think I mean to go away again, Rauho?”

“Well considering what your last loss did to you, it’s not out of the question.”

Drones be damned: if Rauho Noorssen were in front of Buddy right now, she’d have her hands about his throat and her knees in on his chest. That morning, she had also been possessed by the urge to put his unnaturally youthful face in the dirt and grind it a bit. 

“I wouldn’t call him ‘lost’ to me just yet, Rauho,” another page. It’s Vespa staring out a window. Her face is a tired, white reflection in the glass of a window “Jet has escaped captivity before. He will do it again.”

“Oh, this isn’t a simple captivity. Dark Matters won’t put him away in a cell to rot, Buddy. He’s the Unnatural Disaster. You can’t let a man like that sit in the dark and trust him to just moulder away. I’ve been told that Min Kanagawa has something planned for him. A televised execution, I expect.”

Buddy shuts the book on her the figure of her wife curled against the graphite void. She goes into the hall, closing Peter’s door behind her with a vow not to return until she has Peter’s permission. Buddy moves towards the control room. She takes care with her movements so that it will not be obvious to Noorssen that she is walking anywhere. 

“What are you calling for, Rauho? To gloat?”

“No, as I said, Buddy, to offer my condolences on your recent loss. And to offer an opportunity at self-improvement. I would hate to have you slip back into your old patterns of bitter anonymity.”

“Oh?”

At her approach, Rita peers over the back of the pilot’s seat. Buddy motions for her to be quiet.

“Yes. Don’t play stupid. It doesn’t suit you. Look, you know that I know that the main reason you’re able to make a play for the cure-mother prime like this is because Jet supports you. Excessive ambition cost you one partner, once. You’d think you would have learned your lesson.”

Buddy leans over Rita and watches the radar screen. The majority of the ship signatures are still packed in around The Platonium. Drawing a line about the perimeter of this cluster with her finger, Buddy gestures to the space around it and to the retreating pinprick that is the Carte Blanche: watch for anything that follows us.

“Alright, Rauho,” she says for Rita’s benefit “Make your offer. I would like very much to hang up on you, sooner rather than later.”

He laughs. The bird on his knee or shoulder mimics the noise with a plastic throat “Come by the house. Bring your secretary. Bring your wife. I would say bring along your little thief friend too, but it sounds like he’s been caught up in the same mess as Jet. Fair warning, Buddy, I have some questions about how in the hell you ended up with ‘Rex Glass’ on your ship. He called himself Titanius Minthe, when I heard of him last.”

Leaving Rita to her own devices, Buddy makes for the med-bay “I’ve been told that he has many names.”

“I wondered about that, Buddy. Why would you let a man like that join your operation?”

“Oh, I suppose I’m getting a bit senile, what with my middle age and my irradiated brain.” 

She edges into the medbay and realises immediately that these house-slippers are going to have to go in the trash. 

Vespa must have come in earlier to let Buddy know that she was going to start work on the Martian. She had the foresight to put down plastic tarps over all the machines and the floor, but really, this is room is going to have to be disinfected by fire.  
There is blood everywhere. A greenish syrup with the consistency of sap or machine oil, sprayed on the ceiling, the floor, the corners, the lights so that everything is the colour of chlorophyll under these lights, and Vespa, who is wearing a rain-slicker, stands over a thing shaped like a squid and appears to be mauling it. No- not mauling. Un-mauling? There are staples and conical plugs scattered around the floor. She watches as Vespa reaches into the mercury-coloured flesh, grasps a plug with pliers that she must have gotten from the tool-box in the garage, and yanks it out.

She is rewarded by a gout of blood and congealed tissue that spills onto the floor. Suddenly, Buddy is knocked a bit. She grasps the door-jamb and stands back as Guapo rushes into the room, and starts to lick the puddle of gore closest to him.

Vespa is so focussed on her job she doesn’t notice Buddy; she’s even put ear-plugs in, though Buddy would guess that is to keep the gore out of her ears rather than sound. But now that Guapo’s been let in, Vespa looks up.

She shouts from behind the mask that Jet wears when he welds “Get that vent-pug out of here! And shut the door!”

Buddy grabs Guapo by his chubby scruff and drags him backwards.

“What was that?” says Rauho.

“My wife,” Guapo has caught a lump of flesh with his tongue-barbs. He drags it out with him, painting a streak of green blood on the floor as they go “She was asking if I wanted anything for lunch.”

“I thought you had a food allergy now.”

Buddy blocks Guapo from scrambling back into the medbay with her knee and shuts the door “Yes, well, it’s the ritual of eating together. She eats, I sit there with a cup of tea, and we talk about our days.”

“Quaint.”

“Communicative. It’s the basis of any healthy relationship. Now, I really do have to go, Rauho, so you go ahead and finish up your vague threats.”

“Come by Kiviuq. I know you’re not too far away. We’ll do dinner in my garden. I’ll eat and you’ll drink tea and we’ll talk about the direction your career should go in. How does that sound?”

At that moment, Juno comes around the corner. He takes in the blood spattering the hem of Buddy’s house-dress and the mud of gore on Guapo’s dragging limbs and the chunk of flesh that he’s eating. His mouth falls open.

“Otherwise,” continues Rauho “I think I’ll have my people bring you in. Or, hell, I’ll ask Dark Matters to pick you up. The Kanagawas owe me a favour. They’re closer, anyway, so why don’t you just come on over on your own? It’ll be easier. More dignified too.”

“Go fuck yourself.” says Buddy.

Juno laughs, taken aback.

“I beg your pardon-”

“I said, go fuck yourself. What, did all that plastic surgery damage your hearing? Have your servants forgotten to clean out your ears today, you useless parasitic lump of money-eating shit? GO FUCK YOURSELF!”

Buddy throws her comms against the wall. It shatters beautifully. Pieces of glass and plastic fly in all directions.  
Finishing the flesh with a gulp, Guapo ambles towards the glass and begins to hoover that up too.

Buddy’s chest heaves. She stares at Juno, who stares back with the glee of a middle-schooler seeing their parent lose their shit in public for the first time. 

The door to the medbay cracks open “Bud? You good?”

“We’re going to have to run, Vespa, and we’re going to have to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time. Ideas?”

“Who’s coming for us?”

“Rauho Noorssen.”

Vespa sighs through her nose “Well, he owns most of the Trojans and all of the Greeks. Hell, he owns the Kuiper Belt- get out, nasty boy, no more for you.”

“So we’re fucked?” surmises Juno.

“No, he’s fucked. I clearly just told him to get fucked.” Buddy stoops and scoops Guapo to her chest so he will stop trying to break into the medbay “And I do not intend to eat my words today. So, I repeat, ideas?”

“Can we submit bad ideas?” says Juno “ ‘Cos I’ve got one of the worst ideas I’ve ever come up with.”

“Sure, darling, shoot.”

“Space Hell.”

Buddy and Vespa exchange a look.

Thinking they’re about to accuse him of hysteria, Juno keeps going “I don’t like the idea either, ok? I don’t believe in hell but I believe there’s like, a hole in the skin of the universe where pus collects, and that can look like hell to a human brain. I just- Jet’s flown through it before. He said it was bad-”

“But not so bad that he couldn’t do it six more times.”

Juno nods “Right, Buddy, right. You’ve heard him talk about it! It wasn’t so bad! He just drew all the blinds and ignored all the hails and he was fine every time.”

Vespa scoffs “Wasn’t he on ketamine for five of those times?”

“Yeah!”

“Maybe the ketamine lessened the effects-”

“Or added to it! Look, look, I know it’s a bad idea. I said it was a bad idea! I’m just thinking, Space-Hell is faster, and there’s an entrance to it by Haumea. That’s gonna be a hard five hour-drive away from us, but isn’t it worth trying?”

Buddy frowns. She feels stupid, with her bloodied dress and the kitty-shaped notepad dangling from her hand.  
“Navigating Space-Hell is a task even the most competent of pilots are afraid to take on. Juno, you forget that Jet is the genius pilot of his generation. Meanwhile, I have one eye, Vespa hates driving, you don’t have a licence for even terrestrial vehicles and Rita is too short to reach the brakes without a stick. Not to mention that we’d need some kind of map of Space-Hell. We’d need to trust our minds, too, that we don’t get too side-tracked by the- the whatever’s in there and blown off-course. One of us has psychosis. Juno, you’re in shock. I’m in shock. There’s a child on-board. Not to mention- where do you mean for us to go? We can’t storm the Kanagawas like this. That will just mean that we are abducted too- it will make bargaining chips out of Jet and Peter, and- and I don’t know what else, Juno.”

Juno falters “But what else can we do?”

“Run. Just, run and hope we can out-pace them.”

“But the guys-”

“Are being taken care of. I’ve just had a quarter of the criminal underworld calling me to update me on Jet’s condition, and they are determined to have him alive. Peter is staying with him. In two days they will have been delivered to Mars.”

“So what, we give up? We retreat?”

“Yes. For now.”

Juno puts his face in his hands “Ok. Ok, Buddy. I trust you. You say we can’t use Space-Hell then we can’t. We’ll think of something else.”

“Maybe you can’t.”

The three of them turn and see a woman, coming from the direction of the garage. Buddy is equally as sure that she has never seen the woman before as she is that the woman is familiar. Familiar, like, Buddy has looked at this woman every day for years. 

“But I can.” the woman grins. Her teeth are smooth and unseparated, like a grille. 

“Martian?” ventures Juno.

“Yeah, but not the one you’re thinking of.” she comes towards Juno, her steps long and shuffling, as if she is uncomfortable only having two feet “It’s me.”

“Who?” 

The woman whistles. A high-pitched, mechanical whistle that a human throat could never make.

When they just keep staring at her, dumbstruck, the woman caves “It’s Ruby, guys. It’s Ruby. Come on, now, you’re hurting my feelings!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> : When Buddy thinks of Jet as her ‘partner’ I’m kind of thinking of them as a QPR. In the podcast it seems like they live together, they work together, they’ve built a life that they share for the most part so like, I’m gonna call it a QPR.  
> That fanon/semi confirmed name we all used as Vepsa’s last name before her focal ep, ‘Ai’, I’ve decided that’s her middle name now. Or she’s got a double-barrel surname. I dunno, I just like it and don’t wanna get rid of it. 
> 
> Also, I know that ideas of a punitive afterlife can be hard for some members of the audience, so for the next chapter while yeah, they are going to hell, I’ll also do a guide for the parts set in hell up in the first notes section, beneath the trigger warnings, and put a summary in the end-notes of that chapter so y’all can skip it without missing key information.


	13. The car calls dibs on driving

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: use of a morgue for people who aren’t dead, gore, animal eating gore, canonically psychotic character experiencing psychosis/hallucination of a loved-one in distress, some body horror relating to PKD that uses insect metaphor, strong language, mentions of hell, discussions of religious (Abrahamic centric) beliefs about the afterlife, character in a tight space which may trigger claustrophobia (though the character doesn’t experience it) mention of predatory relationship, mention of significant age-gap in relationship with younger adult and older adult
> 
> Suggested listening: Max Richter, 'On the nature of daylight'
> 
> We didn't quite get into the Space Hell thing this time. I mean, we get there, but we're gonna explore it next chapter. This time, stay tuned for Ruby not knowing how human bones work, Buddy's opinions on the afterlife and some Juno Steel Musings TM

(Now, the Carte Blanche)

Fucking car’s a fucking person. 

The garage is empty. Juno checks that the car is not simply cloaked to hide her from sight by groping around the space, then jumping, then flailing around the room with his arms as wide as an ice-skater trying not to eat shit. Unless Ruby can shrink herself, too, then she is not here.  
It would be impossible to steal one vehicle out of another vehicle- especially when the one being stolen is capable of calling for help. And what kind of planted agent attempts to gain the trust of their marks by claiming to be their car? Not even Juno would try out a cover-story as Kafka as that. 

Downcast and a little embarrassed by the way he ran off, Juno goes back to the medbay. Ruby stands still and awkward, her hands in her pockets, while Buddy and Vespa stare at her and Guapo, senseless of the tension in the air, rolls contentedly through the streaks of blood he made when he dragged his snack out of the medbay.

“Well?” says the woman who calls herself Ruby.

“The car’s gone.” Juno points at the woman.

“So she stole Ruby.” Vespa keeps trying to edge in front of Buddy, to protect her, but Buddy won’t let her. “She shrank Ruby and put her in her pocket. My brain may have the structural integrity of a wet haunted tissue paper, but I’m not gonna believe just any old horseshit!”

The woman shuffles her feet “Can I prove it to you? That I’m really the Ruby7?”

“And just how are you gonna prove that? Play pre-recorded audio?”  
Juno is surprised by how upset he is right now. Ruby just saved his life and now some jackass breaks onto the ship, hides her and claims to be the car? What the hell kind of strategy is that?

And then the Ruby7 is in the hallway with them. Almost the Ruby7. The woman kind of stretches. Her skin changes to the colour of tree-sap, her body takes on the consistency of taffy, and suddenly she is the hood and front-row seats of a car from the torso up. Her legs remain human and stick out of the bottom of the car like the spindly legs of a fat water-bird.

“Believe me now?” says the car-woman in the voice of Ruby’s AI “Because I can do something else if this isn’t enough.”

Buddy swoons back into her wife “No! No, that’s sufficient for me!”

“Jesus and Buddha.” Vespa rasps.

Oh, wonderful. A Baba-Yaga car. This is just what Juno needed to season this day of blood, betrayal and universe-battering paradigm shifts. 

Thankfully, she changes back with speed and grace. Once she is back to being a human, Juno looks at more carefully. Her face, her body, her hair- they are all familiar.  
This body she has chosen to wear is a composite of each of the six members of the Aurinko Crime Family. While her hair is the light shiny green of the car’s body, it has Rita’s tight coils and texture, worn to the small of her back. Her chubby shape is Juno’s; her formidable bosom is Buddy’s; her brick-shit-house shoulders are Jet’s; her anvil chin is Nureyev’s; her smart and anxious eyes are Vespa’s.  
And her skin tone, inspired by Juno’s except the closer you look, the more the tone looks like a layer of very life-like pigment applied thinly over a greenish base. A chlorophyll colour. The colour of a turgid succulent leaf or coagulating tree sap, or something else natural and healthy and vibrant that Juno has never seen before because the only thing that grows in Hyperion City is mould and a grey creeper that never flowers. 

The longer Juno looks at Ruby’s skin, the more he wants to go lay face-first in some dew-damp grass. 

“I’m sorry about the time I spilled boba on your upholstery!” he blurts.

Ruby smiles. Her teeth are no longer smooth like a grille, but have taken on a sharky, Nureyev-ish quality “It’s alright. I also forgive Rita for spilling wasabi peas in my back-seat. Speaking of, is she driving right now?”

“Yes. We’ve a problem-”

“I know, I was listening. Can we walk and talk at the same time?”

Vespa shakes her head “Wait, wait- I can’t leave the Martian alone. Uh, can you hear them? Am I hurting them?”

“Oh, no, no you’re helping, don’t worry! All you have to do is yank that metal shit out of them and clear out what’s stuck in there. It’s going to be disgusting, I warn you. They’ve been in captivity for a few decades and I can only imagine what kind of build-up there is-”

“I’m from the poorest neighbourhood on Rang, Ruby. I saw stuff that would make a serial killer vomit before I was five. That’s covered.”

“Just help them clear the way. Our bodies are made to regenerate. The one strain of bacteria that was able to infect us is still instinct- I checked when I got here, believe me. They’ll be fine if they have time to heal.”

Nodding, Vespa pulls her mask back into place “Once more unto the brink. I’ve got my comms in here somewhere. Call me if you need me. Oh, and, Bud, when you leaned into me, you got blood all over your back.”

Buddy frowns over her shoulder “I’m afraid this dress is done for.”

All things considered, Rita takes Ruby’s sudden transformation pretty well. First she screams her head off in terror, recognising her borrowed features and taking this to mean that some kind of half-assed doppleganger has come to take her place in the universe. Then, when Ruby has a chance to explain herself, Rita starts to laugh. She points and laughs and sobs until Buddy threatens to dash a bucket of water over her head if she cannot control herself.

Rita consents to be banished from the pilot’s seat by Ruby, who starts to drive a good deal faster than any of them would be comfortable with controlling themselves.  
Now, it seems like a glaring flaw in the crew’s make-up that really only Jet and Nureyev are completely comfortable with flying the ship at great speeds or through difficult flying conditions like a debris field. Juno doesn’t know how to drive the most basic of terrestrial vehicles, Rita is too short to reach the steering wheel and the brakes at the same time without a lot of stretching, Vespa hates to drive and Buddy has only got one eye. Maybe they should think about training Guapo, what, with his prehensile tongue and all? If he just smears some jelly on the steering wheel, Juno is sure he can teach Guapo the basics in under an hour.

As soon as Ruby has aimed them at the thick flank of the nearby Kuiper Belt, she pivots around and begins to explain her plans “Buddy, I know you just explained why going through Space-Hell would be one of the worst ideas possible-”

“But you think you can make it work?”

Ruby’s smile is uncomfortable, perhaps because she isn’t quite sure of how to move her face to create the desired expression yet, or because this is her first time experiencing Buddy’s patented ‘withering stare’. Juno has been less afraid of two-metre mobsters threatening him with a machine gun than he is of Buddy when she gets that look.

Ruby perseveres “I know I can. You said it yourself. One of the biggest problems is that none of you has ever been through Space-Hell before. You’re worried about its effects and navigating while you deal with them. But I’m a veteran of those, uh, eldritch highways. I’ve done plenty of those runs with Jet and other way less qualified and stable pilots. At this point it’s going to be about as frightening to me as a going to the Cerberus Province is for you, Buddy. It can be dangerous, yes, but you know what to do to keep yourself safe while you’re there.”

“Ain’t this th’ first time you ever put on a human body?” Rita wheezes. Juno is fanning her face with the notebook of aliases “How d’you know it’s not gonna change the way ya process it?”

Her forehead creases “Because I’m ‘wearing’ the human body, Rita. My brain is the same.”

“Aw. Ok. I like your hair, by the way.”

“Thanks. I like yours too.”

Buddy clears her throat “What about the rest of us? How do you propose we weather the…unique torments of Space-Hell?”

Juno does something that mortifies him, then. But he feels he would be doing the others a disservice if he didn’t. Nureyev isn’t here to point it out, Rita is too distracted by the Martian-car and the sooner Juno gets used to taking responsibility for himself, the better.  
“I just gotta break in, here, guys. I’m gonna be honest. I’m in a really bad way. The adrenalin is out of my system and I’m already kind of crashing. It’s been a shitty day. I don’t think I can deal with anymore psychological shit without- without some serious, immediate repercussions.”

Buddy’s face softens and she rubs his arm “Of course, Juno. I wouldn’t dream of asking you to do anything more today.”

Guilt roils in his stomach. At the back of his head, a voice that sounds like his and Sarah’s together chants that he is useless, burdensome, unwanted, that he had the knife in his belt the entire time…  
“Not that I’m opposed to the Space-Hell idea!” he turns to Ruby “I brought it up in the first place. If you’re confident that you can get us through it, I trust you to do it. I’m just- I can’t be mentally present when it’s happening. Soup, too.”

Before she can answer him, something causes her head to snap back to the controls. She definitely does not have the bones in her neck right. Juno will tell her that normal humans can’t turn all the way around like that if she ever has to test her disguises in front of other people.  
As far as Juno can tell nothing has changed on the displays- but then, Juno’s computer literacy has not developed that much beyond knowing how to open solitaire. 

Rita can’t see the problem either “What? What’s wrong?”

“Something is chasing us. It’s thickly cloaked. Very thickly.” Ruby points out of the cockpit to their right, where The Platonium and its audience are a faint gleam “I can hear thoughts coming from that direction.”

Buddy takes a step back “You hear human thoughts as well?”

“Not yours, Buddy. I have to make an effort to listen. You’d feel me if I was, don’t worry. I won’t do it without permission.”

Juno nods “It’s like a having a mosquito bite you in the brain.”

“Wait, I beefed out sonar systems up like, a bunch. ‘To a dangerous degree’, if yer scared of innovation like Jet. You should be able to see any space-craft within 600 k’s of us!”

Ruby shakes her head “It’s not that you didn’t Frankenstein the CB hard enough. This is just stuff that you wouldn’t know how to prepare for.”

Rita’s scowl deepens “Ain’t like Dark Matters has been able ta hide anythin’ from me ever since they had that change in management.”

“I don’t think it’s Dark Matters. This feels like private funding-”

“Noorssen!” exclaims Buddy “Dammit! He’s got property on every significant settlement out here. I didn’t think he would have a personal arsenal to dispatch against us. Well- alright, I did, but I didn’t think it would be so sophisticated nor fast.”

“Aw, fuck. I hate that guy. If he were any more full’a hot air, he’d float!”

Thankfully, Ruby spins the rest of her body back to face the controls “We have a 90k lead on them. That’s not much.”

Rita leans over her shoulder “Fuel’s good. I’d say we can go about an hour at full speed. Any more’n that an’ we’re gonna have problems getting’ somewhere safe at any other speed.”

“Should I aim for Space-Hell? I know an entrance that’s much, much closer than Haumea.  
We can be there inside an hour. If he,” she gestures to the invisible pursuer “Keeps up this pace, he’ll be caught up just a little before that. I can buy us time by driving badly, but I need to have a goal in mind when I start weaving and looping and flipping and all that shit. We need to make a call now.”

“The morgue.”

All eyes are on Juno.

He licks his lips “We have two drawers in the morgue. That’s one for me and one for Soup. Vespa only uses them to keep her drinks cool, so it’s not like we’ll be rolling around in corpse juices. She can turn down the temperature, give us sedatives and lock us up. They’re easy to guard especially if Vespa is going to be in the medbay to start with. The things in Space-Hell…won’t they be more interested in the people that are awake and moving around and, uh, easy to get at? I don’t want to throw you guys under the bus, but-”

Buddy has brightened “No, darling, you may absolutely toss me under the bus! That’s an excellent idea.”

Rita is way less enthusiastic “How do we know that’s gonna do anything against whatever it is that’s in Space-Hell? What if Mistah Steel gets trapped in the corpse box with a ghost, Ruby, what happens then?”

“It’s like Juno said. They’re usually more interested in the people that are moving around. Most of them are just creepy, Rita. Jet and I crossed that place six times together and we had one encounter with something violent.”

“Oh, Lord.” Buddy rolls her eyes “Jet has always attributed that- that horned thing to mixing drugs with other drugs, but I knew that scar had to have to come from somewhere.”

Rita snaps her fingers “Right! Popped up in his back seat an’ he had ta put Ruby on autopilot an’ wrestle it with his glove-box shank.”

“Glove-box shank?” Juno repeats “Is that what it is? He told me it was an ice-scraper.”

“Look, if we put the vent-toad in the room with Vespa I guarantee you that anything that makes it as far is her will be way more interested in Guapo than Juno or Salad.”

“Great!” Juno claps his hands together “So, I’m gonna go get the kid. Can somebody let Vespa know to get the pentobarbital ready?”

(Vespa)

Decisions were made without her input, which is fine with Vespa. Buddy will have defended her interests. Apparently, they’re going through Space-Hell with an aim to come out near to Mars, land on Phobos and form a plan there. Vespa went through Space-Hell once. She was twenty-two, determined to be invincible and therefore pretended that the bleeding walls and the hunched, demonic forms that peered out of every shadow didn’t bother her. Now that her own brain has turned against her, Vespa laughs, looking back at the paltry efforts of Space-Hell.  
Disembodied screams? People walking through walls? Pansy shit. Vespa probably won’t even notice they’re passing through Space-Hell unless someone tells her.

The labour is split. Vespa will finish work on the Martian and get them as comfortable as possible, which is what she always intended to do. For some reason they also thought it was a good idea to install Guapo in here with her. He is making the inevitable, gargantuan task of cleaning up after the Martian much easier by grubbing up as much of it as he can fit in his jaws at once. She and the vent-creature, whom she has grown dangerously attached to, will guard Juno and the kid while they sleep through Space-Hell in the morgue that Vespa has thus far used to keep her smoothies cold.  
Buddy, Rita and Ruby have the harder job of steering through Space-Hell and staying their chosen course, no matter what the nasty little dimensional tear throws at them. This is one of those occasion when it would be really, really good if they had the full crew: Peter is hard to scare outside of the very specific context of when he runs across an animal larger than, say, a fat coyote. The rest of them aren’t supposed to know that Peter is afraid of big animals, but it’s a hard fear to disguise. Apart from that, Peter is absolutely fearless. As for Jet? He has the startle-reflex of a stone pillar. He is scared of two things only: a relapse into his old addictions and spiders. You could suspend Jet upside-down over an active volcano and he would probably critique the pulley-system you’re using to do it. 

But they’re gone. Vespa doesn’t know what to feel about that except for blind, blank anger at Peter for cutting himself off from his primary/only health-care provider in the late stages of his terminal illness. For Jet, it is confusion as to how the hell Dark Matters beat him in the first place, the sever injury and blood loss aside. Where did they find handcuffs big enough to fit his wrists? Where did they find a stretcher big enough for him?  
Interesting a thought exercise as how Dark Matters might be negotiating the Jet-situation is, her mind keeps coming back to Peter. So much so that her mind conjures up a Peter to follow her around the medbay as she begins to carve out an aisle in the gore for Juno. 

A part of her feels betrayed. Paradoxically, because she has intimate knowledge of what’s going on inside of Peter’s body and that’s a lot more than anyone else. He has given him her trust. Vespa hasn’t got the right to be resentful about the amount and context of that trust. But she is. She is, she is, she is, she is mad that the iceberg whose tip she has been bumping against for years has been hoisted out of the water and examined by people who don’t even know him. She keeps thinking ‘I deserved to do that’. 

While Vespa is putting a folded comforter in either of the morgue drawers, Juno schleps the dozy kid in on his hip. She obeys when Juno tells her not to look or breathe- as if the kid can’t tell the place is covered in gore, or that the Martian’s in a catatonic blob on a table right beside her.  
In shorts and a shirt borrowed from Rita’s stash of neon pinks and polka-dots, and with the soot and the blood wiped off her face, she suddenly looks her age. A kid. A kid who has had to be carried out and still dozes on Juno’s shoulder. A kid whose homelife was so awful that she had to take it upon herself to sort of hijack the mission and make herself one of the ‘assets’ brought back from The Platonium. Looking at her littleness and the necessity of her trust in Juno makes Vespa’s chest tight, and warm, and watery. Now that’s a feeling she doesn’t know.

An impulse from deep within her hominid DNA simmers in her: suddenly it’s the Pleistocene again and she’s got to find a big stick and mantle over the kid. 

Vespa is the one who explains their idea. Her responsibility, as the doctor, to make the kid feel safe. She puts her hands in her pockets because otherwise she knows she’d be digging her nails into her palms. She has to be careful about her volume; to hear ears, she should be shouting, because Peter is right there competing for her attention and the air-space. Describing his symptoms to her. He can see inside of himself, now, without needing an X-ray. He wants her to come into the next room and take a look at what has happened to his spine. He says the cysts are moving inside of him like ants. 

Gamely, Soup allows herself to be lowered into the drawer and yawns as it glides shut, plunging her into what would be a darkness if Vespa hadn’t sent her in with a few glowsticks.  
Vespa always wonders why the hell she lets Buddy put glowsticks on the shopping list and then a situation arises like this, where glowsticks the perfect tool for the situation, and Vespa wonders why she ever questions anything her wife does. 

Knocking on the door of it, Vespa opens and shuts it a few times to demonstrate to Soup that she is not trapped. The kid has gone in feet-first, so her sleep-wrinkled face peers up at Vespa every time she pulls it out. Peter, too, but she cannot see him, which is a good thing because the skin has started to slough off of his rib-cage to expose the red ropes of muscle.

“I’ll be here the whole time. If you need anything, you go ahead and knock.”

Peter reaches over the drawer to grasp Vespa’s shoulder. She tells herself she does not feel it. Soup doesn’t flinch. 

“What am I gonna need?”

“Bathroom?” Vespa shrugs, tossing Peter’s hand off at the same time “Snacks?”

Her sleepy face furrows “At the same time? Ew, do you eat on the toilet?”

Ok, there goes the urge. It’s the Holocene again and Vespa is a modern human being acutely aware that this eight-year-old is mocking her.

“No I do not-”

“You just told me we’re going into an alternate dimension full of people that wanna eat me.”

“That’s not what I said-”

“Do you think I’m dumb? Do you think I’ll get so hungry I’m gonna put my head out to demand a juice box and get it bitten off by demons?” the kid nestles lower into her drawer “Nu-uh. I saw ‘Alien’. I know how this stuff works. Shut the lid on me. If something tries to eat you, make it chase you outta the room so I don’t gotta step on a mess to get out. Also, it smells like blueberries in here.”

“There’s a reason for that.”

“It’s sticky at the back. Is that blood?”

“No, I spilled a smoothie in there last week. Since you pointed out what a dumb idea it would be to leave your drawer, you can go ahead and lick the stain up if you get snack-ey.”

Soup gestures for her to shut the drawer. Vespa does so with relish. At least that last comment pushed some button in her brain and took Peter away. 

“This,” she turns to Juno “Is one of the myriad reasons that Bud and I don’t have kids.”

“I can still hear you.” says Soup.

Peter laughs.

(Rita)

Rita always thought the biggest paradigm shift in her life was gonna be the shock of leaving Earth, where things made sense and people took care of each other, and joining the Spacers where the world was slapdash and the safety-nets were basically just big old holes standing next to each other. She knew from maybe the first day that she’d made a mistake, but taking it back would mean taking back all the things she said when she left. 

When you’re a twenty-one-year-old who thinks you have to burn some bridges if you wanna leave your protective parents’ home and stay gone, you say some things that you don’t mean. Or that you mean but that you would say in a different way if your head was maybe a bit cooler in the moment.  
Leaving home is a paradigm shift. Suddenly, all the claims you make about your own independence, your capacity to take charge of your own shit- that all gets put to the test. In Rita’s case, she was doing it in a world that was neither familiar nor kind. So it was a bad time all around. She got through it. Flailed and paddled through the first few months, found herself jobs here and there, then Juno and Franny and Hyperion City, and there she planted herself. It wasn’t what she had imagined for herself. But obviously her imagination had run a bit wild, in terms of what she was capable of doing and what the world would allow her to do.

That should have been the biggest shock of Rita’s life.

And then this lady swans in, this absolute bombshell of a lady who looks like everyone on the ship all at once, waves to Rita and introduces herself as “Ruby. You know, the car?”

Rita is not proud of her reaction. It wasn’t friendly or welcoming, and she loves Ruby, she really does. Making room for another person in her heart- that’s what comes natural to her, but Rita didn’t expect to have to do anything else today except for panic and mourn. Now she’s got to be friendly and accommodating and understanding of their need to make the trip with Space-Hell. Rita isn’t sure she believes in hell, but she sure believes in science. If science says that Space Hell is a wormhole whose cosmic mysteries are interpreted as ghosts and ghouls by a fundamentally superstitious culture then there’s your answer!

But she just wants to take a nap! Two of her friends have just been ripped away from her, her favourite of whom has been injured so badly that he’s on life-support. She misses Peter for herself and for Juno and- it’s just a mess, and she just wants to cry about this into her pillow, but she can’t because she’s an adult and adults take care of business before they cry. While they cry.

“Rita?”

She snaps around to face Buddy and says, too quickly, too shrilly “I’m fine!”

God, look at Buddy Aurinko. Her best friend has been abducted and the upper echelons of her world have just turned against her, and she hasn’t so much as smudged her mascara. Come on, Rita. Get it together. Be like Buddy. Buddy waits until she’s behind closed doors to lose her shit and so will you.

“I’m fine,” she repeats, calmer “I’m just thinkin’.”

Rita has the neglected co-pilot’s seat while Ruby has the wheel, and Buddy drifts from panel to gauge to screen to window, at once aimless and busy. Until today, Rita has never seen someone sit in the co-pilot’s seat and actually help fly the ship as she is. The last time she was in this seat it was because she wanted to see Callisto’s ionospheric storms from the inside. 

“Do you believe in a hell, darling?”

Rita laughs “Nah. Do you?”

“Sort of. Not quite in the Abrahamic understanding of it. I’m a pagan in the Finnish school, of sorts,” Buddy fishes a necklace out of the depths of her bosom and shows Rita the twisted symbol strung on it “My gods are extremely specific and contextual, and our dead go to the same place no matter how they acted in their lives. We go a kingdom, Tuonela or Pohjola or Manala depending on what you prefer, to be the subjects of a pair of god-kings and their giant guard swan. I know, I know, it doesn’t sound like an attractive prospect.”

“The hell’s a guard swan?”

“Exactly what it sounds like.” Buddy glances out the window in the direction of their invisible pursuer. Gaining, as Ruby predicted. Gaining fast.

“And yer ok with that? With goin’ to th’ same place as bad guys?”

Buddy pushes the necklace back down her stained house-dress “It makes it easier to believe in omnibenevolence, doesn’t it? If your gods put all of you in the same place at the end, then you needn’t worry about being separated from a family member who makes mistakes. It seems a sort of forgiveness to me…no matter what you did in your life, you are returned to the same primordial swamp as everyone else. And it holds us living people accountable to our own laws. We cannot simply shrug off the crimes we see as ‘up to the gods to punish’.”

“We’ll be through in a few minutes.” says Ruby. She is not about to offer up her own opinions on religion and afterlives. 

Rita squints from the radar to the cockpit “How come it ain’t showin’ up on any ‘a the instruments?”

“Here, hold on.” Ruby had turned off the alerts on all the hails they were receiving, assuming that they were coming from the ship that follows them stubbornly “This is how you can tell we’re close.”

A handful of alerts chime in unison. A private number, the screen says. With one hand, Ruby dismisses the notifications and turns a dial so that the screen is now displaying the soundwaves of the public band. In more inhabited parts of space, this band is used the way a long-haul truck driver would use their citizens-band radio down on Turtle Island and Aztlan. People telling jokes, stories, catching up with friends, talking about politics and the war and the latest sightings of the Ruby7.  
In the Kuiper Belt, signals are constantly interrupted by the enormous amount of debris and other satellites competing for the limited space. At first, this is what Rita thinks she is hearing; the snow of a bunch of vessels vying for limited air-time. But the more she tries to listen, the more the words elude her. It is like listening to a conversation in a language which she has a passing knowledge of: every now and then she catches a word or a sound that is familiar, but they too are scattered to piece together the topic or purpose of the speakers.

A chill climbs her spine. Rita crosses her legs beneath her and kneels forwards in the seat, putting her ear right up to the speaker in the dashboard. Though the sound is being piped all the way through the cockpit, Rita feels as if she could make out what is being said if she gets close enough.

“What are they saying?”

Ruby shrugs “I don’t think of it as talking, Rita. It’s more like…well, you wouldn’t call it talking when a baby starts to mimic the noises they hear their parents make. It’s pretending to talk. Pretending to talk so you can connect. I think it’s the same deal for most of the things in there.”

Buddy lifts her head from the fuel gauge, which she hovered over since they began to flee in earnest “My brother Champ was like that. He had a few phrases that he seemed to understand- in that he understood the meaning we assigned to them, ‘we’ being my sister Sportti and I.”

Champ and Sportti, thinks Rita, is there no end to the Aurinko parents’ cruelty?

“The rest of it was just idle chatter to amuse himself and us.”

“Was your brother not very verbal, then?”

Buddy grins “Oh, no, darling, quite the contrary. He never shut up. His species are quite talkative.”

“Species?”

“He was an African grey parrot. Three years my senior, and I’m the middle child. He was my parents’ practice baby. He would say whatever we said back to us, but for him, the way he said ‘I love you’ was by offering peanuts.” Buddy looks at their faces and frowns “You seem surprised. I am sure I have mentioned him before.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah. You just never mentioned that your brother was a parrot.”  
Ruby is not laughing because she has no context for what a weird omission of facts that is to make. 

Rita, for her part, is on the verge of tears. Another peak of today’s emotional rollercoaster. God, will it be bad if she goes and wakes up Juno to tell him about this? He needs a laugh and this would have him fucking rolling down the halls.

The voices are louder, now. Perhaps not louder. Stronger? Closer? No clearer, though.

Noticing that Rita has gotten jittery, Ruby turns the volume down “Sorry, Rita. I can’t turn it all the way off. I kind of need the voices as a landing strip.”

“That’s ok.” although her face shows that it is not.

“Ask me a question.”

Outside of the cockpit, the space has begun to distort like the skin of a soap bubble.

“Huh?”

“I know you’re bursting with them,” Ruby changes gears. They jump forwards, suddenly, pressing Rita back into her seat and sliding Buddy a few inches across the floor “Your escape vehicle/ friendly car revealed herself as a Martian. Aren’t you curious about that?”

“Kinda?” Rita’s pink nails dig into the armrests. The world is rippling against the CB’s nose. The texture has changed from soap to the flesh over an old wound, falling apart in threads of pus “I guess ya got yer own reasons fer bein’ here.”

The voices are all around, now, and not just because the cockpit has got good surround-sound.

Buddy has come to lean on the back of Rita’s chair. She grasps the other woman’s shoulder, as much for emotional support as for balance “I admit I am curious.”

“Well, I’m a double alien. I am a Martian, but the same way you’re an Earthling, Buddy. That’s where your people started out.

“’Double alien’ would be a good name fer ‘a band. Ms Buddy, you wanna sit with me?”

Buddy’s got such a grasp on the back of Rita’s chair that she’s about to pull a chunk of it off “No, thank you, I am fine to stand.” 

Ruby is as calm as if she were standing in line at a grocery store “It’s a lot to get into right now, when we’ve got so much other stuff on our minds. I don’t think it’s really worth explaining to you guys in depth when I’ll just have to repeat the story for Juno and Vespa and the boys. Let’s just say…well, I’m from your neighbouring galaxy, the one you call Andromeda. My group of people, my Martians, we left this galaxy when the biggest mammal was still small enough to live in a hole underground. Something happened to our, uh, Mesopotamia. Our ‘cradle of civilization’ was fractured. Some of us had to leave for our own safety and I’m descended from those people.”

She lets that hang in the air for a moment, concentrating instead on the space in front of her as it struggles and parts over a raw, red light. Rita’s ears are ringing and they don’t stop when Ruby flicks the radio off, at last. The red light expands before then and bathes them in eerie hues. Somehow, the absence of the voices is louder than their muttering.

“We lost contact with ‘home’ a long time before I was born. It was a slow process, I think. These differences crept in, differences made by the distance between us and the original colonies, and it eroded what was common to us. And there were these wounds. The reason my people left Mars- it was for survival, and as much as you miss your home when you have to leave it, you’re so, so fucking mad at it for forcing you to be a refugee in the first place. You remember the good and the familiar and the love and it’s so hard to hold onto that when the last memories of a place are these same people who provided some of the familiar rejecting you.”

The light engulfs them. Rita shuts her eyes and shields them with her hand. In the half-dark, through the pounding of blood in her ears, Rita listens to Ruby.

“We were out of contact for millennia, and then fifty years ago they reached out to us. It was a distress call, probably from the one Vespa’s working on right now. I’m an advance scout. I came out here with another of my species, and more of us have come since then, looking for the source of the signal. Imagine our surprise when we come and find our ancestors extinct and their settlements in ruins. There are none of us left. Those mammals that were just rats when last we saw them? They’re everywhere. Spread across the galaxy, on top of cemeteries they barely pay attention to.”

At once, the light is gone. Rita peers through her fingers and sees a cavernous, jagged world in front of them.

Ruby’s knuckles are bloodless on the wheel “Not that I hold it against you guys. It was just…not what I was expecting. Anyway, welcome to Space-Hell."

(Juno, the morgue)

Juno does not linger outside of his drawer for long after Soup is installed. What’s the point? He’s tired. He was ambushed with something that wore his dead brother in an attempt to reach out to him, had a panic attack that lasted for almost an hour, then afterwards had to collect himself for long enough to pay a visit to an old acquaintance turned traitor, and then he had to sit through an interrogation that went from awkward to petrifying in a matter of minutes, then navigate a war-zone to make an escape on his own.  
And he apparently has a kid to take care of now?

The only reason Juno is not a sobbing mess on the bloody floor of the medbay is because he does not want to inconvenient Vespa by making her step around his melt-down. Also, because Vespa is with him. Here in the medbay, she is a bastion of strength and reason and comfort. She took over on the kid, got her settled in as comfortably as Soup could be. It reminded Juno that this sudden addition to the crew- to his family- this is not someone he is responsible for alone.  
And thank God that he isn’t. Juno isn’t at the point where he feels like he could be responsible for Guapo on his own, let alone the health and well-being of another human. A vulnerable human who needs him to survive. Even as he thinks it, he hates himself for it: but he can kind of relate to Sarah’s venomous panic.

This is what Juno dwells on as he lays in the cool, cushy darkness of his morgue drawer. He can’t make himself stop. 

It is a horrifying thing to have a helpless person dropped into your lap when you aren’t ready for them. Juno resolved he was never going to have kids very early in his life, in the same way one might resolve they are never going to die in a building fire. The thought hardly crossed his mind unless someone brought it up to him, and his response was always horror, immediate and thorough, at the suggestion that Juno would subject himself to that kind of ordeal.  
Children was never a part of his life-plan and Juno never intended to make room for them. Now that he’s with Nureyev? That has changed from a surety to an iron-clad vow. There is no way for them to conceive naturally since Nureyev had a hysterectomy in his twenties.

Neither of them want kids. Ergo, they will not have kids. 

The fact that Juno has been in a relationship long enough to have set this boundary is stunning to him in the first place. His first significant, long-term romantic relationship was a disaster from start to finish. He is still dealing with its consequences and likely will be until his dying day. 

Besides all of that, Juno thought it was supposed to take a while to fall in love, not an afternoon of detective work and then a two-week sabbatical in a Martian tomb.

After adolescence was finished with him and stopped spraying hormones through his brain every time a pretty face turned his way, that had certainly been true. It was true with Diamond. Hell, Juno didn’t want to be in love with Diamond.  
The day Juno left Diamond was also the day he decided that romantic love was not a thing that Juno Steel could have. From now on he was a hook-up only. A one-night stand kind of lady. Love ‘em, leave ‘em wanting more and then never give them more because Juno refused to be known. The perfect person could be dropped into his lap from a celestial hand with ‘JUNO’S TRUE LOVE’ written across their perfect naked body, and Juno would still tell them to fuck off.

Juno Steel is not a lady who can be loved.

And damn if Peter Nureyev didn’t take that as a challenge. Nureyev’s first impression of Juno involved the man crawling out a window to avoid talking to people. Second, third, fourth and fifth impressions only confirmed the notion that Juno was not only waist-deep in a trash fire of his own making but insisted that he liked being there. 

Yes please, says Peter Nureyev. 

Why did Juno protest? The long answer discusses painful introspection. However, there is an equally true, shorter answer: Juno thought it was a joke.

If not a joke, then a trap. If not a trap, then a manifestation of a stroke Nureyev didn’t realise he was having. Then, however unlikely, if it was none of those things, then this relationship was just another pain waiting to happen. Someday the relationship would end and leave Juno worse off for it.  
And then Juno started taking anti-depressants and realised, hey, maybe that wasn’t the most healthy pattern of thinking, and maybe he should discuss these emotions with Nureyev before he dismissed the possibility of a relationship? 

He revised his script a thousand times and berated himself at each revision. He questioned the need to tell Nureyev anything at all. Why should Juno have to keep putting himself out there like this? Nureyev didn’t need to know everything. He hadn’t told Juno everything about himself.  
Except, about Brahma. About the almost-tyrant he left on the floor of a true tyrant’s installation. About the name that you get when you peel back all the aliases and the false men and the motives that don’t quite add up in retrospect…

Juno’s arm has begun to fall asleep. He lifts his arm from his side, too quickly, over-estimating the amount of space he has got in the drawer, and whacks his wrist into the low ceiling. 

“Shit!”

From somewhere to his left, Vespa yelps “Jesus fuck! Juno- don’t do that to me! I forgot you were in there!”

He tries to say sorry, but his mouth is kind of numb so it comes out slurred. Vespa gets the gist of it. 

In the end, what came out of Juno was rawer and messier than he intended. Four minutes in he kind of threw that carefully, punitively curated script out of the window and said what was on his troubled mind, in his troubled heart.  
He talked about Diamond Té and the narrow escape he made from becoming Juno Té.

“It was really last minute. I left our apartment to get married and never went back. Mick went back and packed a bag for me instead…I got stuck in front of the mirror, in my gown, in my henna and I was thinking about the fact that they wouldn’t even let me have a chuppah- that’s the canopy you stand under, by the way.”

They were in Juno’s bed, initially to watch a horror stream that Juno was too scared to watch on his own. Somehow that evolved into the Juno Steel’s Confessions Hour. He is sure he blindsided Nureyev with it, but Nureyev just paused the stream and listened with his full attention.  
Nureyev was nodding. Next door, Jet was sneezing.

“And then I was like…why am I doing this? Why am I marrying a person who hasn’t made a single compromise in the entire time I’ve dated them? Why am I marrying a person who tells me ‘I love you because it’s the right thing to do’.”

Another sneeze, louder.

Nureyev shook his head “That’s an awful thing to say.”

“Yeah. For a long time I though it was noble. Like, Diamond was doing me a service by being with me. They were older. A lot older. I thought it was alright because I was nineteen years old and, you know, you get told that the minute you’re past eighteen you’re fair game for anybody. They certainly thought so. I didn’t think it was bad that I was nineteen and that the person I was dating was twenty-six.”

Nureyev pulled a face that could kill “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. It was bad. It was…I think they could smell that I’d just had the loss, you know? It’s not like Benten’s death made the papers or anything. Old-towners murdering Old-towners doesn’t mean anything to the rest of Hyperion, but Diamond knew that I was in an extremely bad place and that it would be easy to take advantage of me-”

This one sounded like Jet was trying to scare off a predator, or match the ferocity of one roaring in front of him.

Nureyev held up a hand to ask Juno to pause then pounded on the wall “Take an antihistamine!”

Juno was crying, but that made him smile “You know he can’t hear you. He’s listening to a podcast.”

“Still, it should have occurred to him. Ridiculous man.”

Ridiculous man. Ridiculous man, laying beside Juno, listening to him without judgement or pity. Just listening.

Juno loved him. Loves him. Hopes he will have a chance to say it again- to Nureyev’s face. 

Juno cannot tell if his eye is open or closed. The drawer is hard beneath his back. There will be aches, later, assuming they make it out of Space-Hell. He listens to his pulse and to the echo of Nureyev’s voice in his head, as he at last begins to drift off into the depths of artificial sleep, and tells himself that he will see Nureyev soon. 

Please, God, soon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I ended up having a lot more to say about Space-Hell than I thought I would. In recognition of this, this chapter’s gonna be a bit shorter and the one following it is going to be a small novel unto itself.
> 
> This brings up a structural problem I’ve been grappling with a bit: should I just keep publishing this fic like the epic it’s turning into, or should I calm down and publish this as two works? This as the first part of an epic two-parter, the second of which would follow pretty soon after. Literally, the only reason for not just committing to a forty-chapter epic that I can think of is that I haven’t seen one of those for TPP before and I’m worried that the length might overwhelm or alienate some readers.  
> I’m happy to continue at this pace and output until the story ends (probably in ten or twelve more chapters?), but let me know what y’all are feeling. Should we keep going or split this into two?


	14. Family reunions are just like this

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: Strong language, canonically psychotic character experiencing psychosis, psychotic character interacting with physical/real entities which somewhat resemble her psychosis, heavy elements of supernatural horror, lots more blood than usual, discussion of religious beliefs in relation to this horror, mentions of pagan religions+ gods specific to Finnish paganism, smoking around kids, mentions of industrial accidents, mentions of strokes, mentions of grieving for lost family members, mass grave, references to child/teenager abuse and being predated on, mentions of misgendering, canonically trans character discussing medical transition with a parent, mentions of drug use, brief description of character being choked (in Buddy’s last perspective)
> 
> Trigger warning map: quick note before we dive in. A lot of what ended up in this chapter isn’t necessarily what we think of when we think of ‘hell’, which is often inspired by Abrahamic ideas and conceptions of the afterlife. This chapter more appeals to the personal fears and neuroses of each character to inspire fear. Still, not everybody wants to read that so here’s a more detailed trigger guide for those of y’all who want to skip around a bit. 
> 
> Significantly more gore than usual: Buddy’s parts, especially the second and third. She also interacts with a lot of fingernails, clipped and with no sign of blood/distress, but if you don’t like fingernails they’re still there. 
> 
> Interacting with dead family members: Buddy’s last part, all of Vespa’s parts
> 
> Abrahamic-demonic imagery: Buddy’s last perspective as she begins to interact with the ghost. Very brief, earlier mention at the beginning of the chapter where Jet is described as having wrestled with something ‘horned’
> 
> Suggested listening: Radical Face, ‘Holy Branches’

(Buddy)

The floor changes to human nails beneath her feet. Fragments of nails. Painted, bare, chipped by work or perfect by idleness, and beneath them the true ground is visible, which is the colour of quartz and egg-shell smooth. Buddy freezes. An iron taste of fear climbs into the back of her throat.  
After a beat, she swallows it, and tests this new ground by rolling her heels. Beneath her, the ground crunches, but does not give. It is like walking on the slate beaches where she and Sportti learned to swim, and Champ learned that sea urchins and all manner of other rock-pool creatures were edible if he tried hard enough. Perhaps it would be painful to walk on if Buddy did not still have farm-kid’s feet. She and her sister had shoes, of course, but only wore them to work or if it was too cold to expose one’s toes to the elements. Everywhere else they went bare-foot, which was common on the Nen. If you wore shoes regularly before you were at least fifteen, either you had a sensory issue with tarmac and mud, or you were fucking weird. 

Buddy continues on her way. Apart from the floor, the ship remains unaltered by entering Space-Hell. Buddy wishes she had not left Rita and Ruby up in the cockpit, because it would be interesting to know if she is the only one for whom this change has occurred, or if the other two can also see a floor paved with fingernails. This is straight out of the Kalevala, of course, which her mother knew by heart and would recite when it was too cold to go outside and the kids were driving her to despair.   
The runo which describes Väinämöinen wandering into Tuonela while bride-hunting was Champ’s favourite, which he recited in endless, exacting detail. Logically, it could be that this strange place has picked the firmest interpretation of ‘hell’ that exists in Buddy’s brain and projected it for her to see. This thought is a small comfort, however, as she picks her way to hers and Vespa’s bedroom, the nails crunching beneath her feet. The sensations are too real for her taste.

Much as Buddy would have preferred to stay up in the cockpit, Ruby has assured her there is no physical danger posed by Space-Hell provided you acted as if nothing was going on. Go about your business. Gas-light the shades and the strange, horned shapes composed of the fears of all who have passed it by before into thinking that they are the ones seeing things. Become the hallucination.  
Do not react or draw undue attention to yourself by doing something phenomenally stupid like, say, pulling off onto the shoulder of the bone-paved byway to air out the car because you accidentally hot-boxed her so hard that it’s become impossible to see where you’re going. Then, if a thing that looks like the Christian Devil on steroids charges at you from the woods, you’ve brought it on yourself.

“Damn, Ruby, yer really exposin’ Jet’s butt when he ain’t even here ta defend himself.” said Rita.

“Twice, Rita. He did that twice.”

“Wait, the air out there is breathable?” Buddy asked.

Outside, it looked like the gods picked up a cemetery and shook all the bones out, then some kind of volcanic eruption had filled the air with ash and sent out runnels of lava that cooled, mounded, creating barrows whose occupants were frozen in the process of crawling out. Sprinkle a bit of creepy ever-green forest, a bit of swamp, add a few derelict buildings for the aesthetic of it and open up the result to any old goth who needed a place to anguish for the evening. There was a robust population of ghosts or things which mimic them. They barely react as the Carte Blanche passed by and nestled itself into the network of lava-rock gutters which apparently served as the roads here. Buddy counted several ship-wrecks, rusted and fresher than she wanted to see, around which there were more of the shades. She could not tell if they were the ghosts of those who had died in those wrecks or if they were lingering on

In place of a ceiling there was a starless dark that began at the tops of the buildings and the trees. There was a slight vault to it that seemed to follow the curve of the road, reminding Buddy of a cathedral’s interior. The road itself was branched in all directions, heedless of any obstacles which, in turn, bisected to permit it past. A ten-story building parted like curtains before it. A thin tree was vivisected with not so much as a pine needle growing over the path. And there were at least twelve different options stretching off into the low dark and the ashy mist.

“Yeah, for a few minutes. I wouldn’t recommend a stroll.” slowing the ship to a safer pace, Ruby pointed to another ship, twice their sized, crumpled into one of the lava flows. “See those figures on the ground? The ones that crawled out of that wreck? I’m betting the air wasn’t kind to ‘em.”

“That an’ they ain’t got backs or spines no more.” added Rita. “Looks like Megalodon’s alive an’ well in Space-Hell!”

Childish as it would have been to ask for an escort to her own damned office, Buddy would have made Rita come along with her if Ruby hadn’t needed a co-pilot to help her watch for pedestrians. The ceiling obliges them to fly so low the CB’s belly is in danger of scraping the dirt, which is hard enough on its own. Ruby needs the extra eyes to watch for the things that sometimes throw themselves in front of ships. If a ship crashes in Space-Hell without back-up already on hand, then there’s almost no hope for the passengers.   
And the things in the road- their friends, peering from the forest and cracked windows, they know this too. 

Fine. Buddy has got to work. She has got to sit down at her desk and puzzle this out, and have the plan of a plan outlined before they get to Phobos. Every moment she wastes in fear is a moment the boys can ill-afford. She shudders to think of what’s going to happen to them. Peter, with all of his aliases bobbing to the surface like corpses rotting free of their concrete shoes, and Jet, knocked out on an anaesthetic that could very well trigger the addictive impulse he has to manage so carefully.

So it doesn’t matter that the floor has changed to fingernails. Buddy has got men to free and the cure-mother prime to locate. 

First, though, she has got to change out of this dress, and probably burn it. 

(Vespa)

She smells him before she sees him. Acrid fake-tar smell creeping in under the welding mask. Persistent and as sneaky as a whisper.   
That’s how she knows that this shape in the corner isn’t her brain up to its usual tricks. Vespa rarely has olfactory hallucinations to accompany the auditory and visual- it’s one thing she’s got in her corner. If she can smell the person then they’re real. The crew have gotten used to being sniffed before they’re acknowledged.   
The man in the corner of the room speaks. She knows without looking twice that it’s her father, only, not her father, not the way he looks and sounds when he’s that flicker in the corner of her eye or the figure at the foot of her half of the bed. She knows through the tinted visor and the film of the years over her memory of when last she saw him laying like a doll in a cardboard coffin. 

He’s not supposed to be here. Things usually don’t chase her into the medbay. When they do, they are half-substantial wisps of threat. She has professional strategies to manage her stress. She has an environment which she controls entirely. Outside triggers can follow her in but they won’t last long here, even when she’s doused in arterial spray and the ground is so covered with gore it’s like being at a water park. This is always where Vespa will feel the safest.

That should extend to things from this dimension. Space-Hell isn’t playing by the rules.

Since he’s not supposed to be here, she gets a little irritated when he starts to talk.

“It always this fuckin’ messy?”

Vespa doesn’t raise her head “You think I always got a Martian on my table?”

He’s smoking one of the synth-tobacco cigarettes that used to hang out of his mouth like an over-long tooth and scorched Vespa’s throat since she could remember. His head was misted by it from the minute he woke up to just a minute before he fell asleep. Whenever he put Vespa on his back, he didn’t have the sense to put his death-stick out and so she’d join him in the mist, or else have it carried back in her face by the wind.   
He’d carry her most every time they were on public streets until she turned ten because he didn’t trust the potholes and sinkholes to give his kid back if she did happen to fall in. 

Vespa is her father’s only kid. Her mother was there for a little while, then dead, and then it was just them until Vespa left Dyssomnia at 16, announcing her intention to stow away on a docked ship and see where that got her. 

“You gonna come back?” said her dad.

Not even a breath of protest. He knew that if she went, then the poverty they shared would lessen for him.  
It was the done thing for many. Kids left the home and were taken advantage of, dying in industrial accidents, of drugs, of abuse, of a thousand other horrible things, but at least they weren’t starving at home. 

“What for?”

He frowned “Alright, point. Listen, kid, if anyone tries funny business, you cut ‘em to ribbons. I don’t care if they’re the supervisor or what. Cut ‘em to shit and run away and start over. Do it eight, nine times, however many tries it takes ‘til you find a place where you can hold your own. And, kid?”

“Yeah, Baba?”

“Get somebody to teach you to read and write.”

The last words they exchanged for ten years. Spoken at least. After four years, Vespa wrote home, addressing the letter to someone on their street who could read so he’d wouldn’t have to puzzle it out for himself. He wrote back using that neighbour as a medium, asking her how many predatory bastards she’d had to cut. Six or seven letters like that per year. They were hard to find the time to write, for both of them. Vespa had to write around an immense omission- her transition, and felt guilty for leaving him out of the loop like that. But her fear of getting into that whole thing trumped the guilt and so her father didn’t know and never got the chance to. He died.   
She went back to Dyssomnia a full ten years after she’d left, literally a changed person, and cleared the house out so whoever else needed shelter could set up. She divided his effects among the community, burned incense in a temple that he occasionally visited and went back home. By then, ‘home’ was Buddy Aurinko, who made up the second of Vespa’s omissions about her life.

There were no photos of her father. Vespa essentially hasn’t seen him since the day she stowed away with his blessing, which was weird and sad but fine, fine until her brain started falling in on itself and conjured him in the dark, putting ugly words into his mouth.

Now he’s here. The real one, not the one who is real only to Vespa.

“Girl, you act like you’re scared of your Baba.”

(Buddy)

She changes into jeans over a flannel shirt. Dressing down, a bit, but if this rip in reality is going to draw on her of her childhood home to frighten her, then she might as well dress for the occasion. The ulu goes onto her belt. She does not intend to use it for self-defence; for that, she keeps a laser-derringer in her bra. It feels as though it would invite poor luck to part with Jet’s things right now. The only thing that is stopping her from going into his closet for that bomber jacket is the possibility of getting blood onto it if she has to retrieve Vespa from the medbay.   
A bandana over her hair finishes the outfit off and makes her look ready to plunge into crop-fields at any moment. Whether or not Space-Hell can cause her harm, Buddy doesn’t want her hair to be touched. This means that her eye and the radiation-puckered scars are on display too. Perhaps if she shows off her scars the monsters will take her for one of their own.

They have started to show up- the monsters. 

Space-Hell follows its bold starting move with something arguably worse. Buddy walks out of her room with a comms-pad and the notebook under her arm and almost trips flat over a prone, shrouded figure. A body stretched out on the floor and hastily covered in a piece of ragged blue tarp. The tarp, Buddy knows, is ragged because it was cut off of a dust-sheet that went over the machines at night, and whoever did the job under-estimated the size of the piece needed to cover her father. He was kind of tall for the Nen. His boots and ankles emerge from the end of the tarp, muddied by work.   
If you look close there is the tiniest bit of his own gore stamped into the dirt too. He managed a few steps before he fell, whereupon he bled out on the factory floor with his head in the foreman’s lap.

A toolbox has been placed on his chest. Bad taste, perhaps, but it kept the tarp from sliding off while they were figuring out how to remove the body from floor without interrupting too much of the production line. 

Buddy recovers her balance and steps smartly over the figure. She remembers pulling the necklace off her father’s neck. The evidence is tucked into her shirt beside the derringer. Her father is in the swampy ground of the Nen and likely floating a bit in his coffin. He is dead and she grieved the worst of it a long time ago, and still lives with that nagging grief that never goes away, that sometimes catches up to her in strides and presses the full weight of an orphan’s loneliness to her ribs and makes the simplest of tasks seem impossible. But only sometimes. 

Buddy is determined that Space-Hell will not be the thing that makes her feel the loss afresh. 

The door to her office is open. It shouldn’t be. For a moment, she hopes it is just Guapo, who may or may not know how to open doors. They haven’t caught him at it yet but it would explain how he’s been letting himself out of the bathroom at night, where he’s supposed to sleep, so he can sit on the end of Vespa’s side of the bed. 

Buddy thinks about running into the medbay and squeezing into Juno’s drawer. She pushes the door all the way open and strides to her desk, dropping the notepad onto the blueprints and other papers that are already unfurled there. Largely useless now, she suspects, as they were plans for what type of facility they were going to need to produce cure-mother prime at a significant scale.   
Whatever Noorssen says, the Devereauxes will uphold as gospel because their empires share far too many borders to risk a war over a disagreement. She certainly didn’t make matters easier for herself by bloodying the noses of all of La Charladora’s niblings. Further on down the line, the loyalty or sympathy of a few discrete criminals may help her out, but her priorities have just changed.

The moment Buddy sits and tries to relax into her work, she notices a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. She lifts a paper and holds it to the light as if trying to make out a faint bit of annotation. Through the paper, she sees that a demonic approximation of her brother has perched on top of her bookshelf. 

The monstrosity that squats on top of her copy of the Edda must have started life as a parrot. Then, its designer got a bit too creative with its grotesqueness, stretching the creature out to an uncanny height and thinness, adding the feathers in a way that makes them look like an extension of the skin rather than protruding from it. The effect is a swollen creature that only looks like a parrot because she knows that Space-Hell is trying to use her dead family against her.

“Peanut? Buddi, peanut?” says the parrot-demon in uncertain Finnish.

Buddy covers up its needling voice by tearing out the notepad sheets on which she’s recorded Peter’s many selves and stacking them in the corner for later. Flipping over the now useless blueprint, Buddy writes down the information she received over her burner phone and tries to get a grasp of the Kanagawa’s plan. Of Dark Matters’ plan.  
The parrot-demon insists that Buddy needs a peanut. Blood pours from its beak and joins what has pooled on the ground from the walls, which are also bleeding now. Buddy ignores the clammy feeling of it soaking through the bandana and into her scalp. 

(Vespa)

“I’m not a girl, Baba, I’m fifty-eight.”

At least he’s referring to her by the right gender. That’s more than the other one has ever done.

“You’re still a girl compared to me.”

“I’m older than you ever got to be by twenty years.”

Sighing, he concedes that argument “I watch you, sometimes.”

Vespa dumps a load of the scraps into the bucket and lifts it out of the way, on top of a plastic-covered counter “Why? Go to whatever’s next.”

“I can’t, girl.”

“Why not?”

“No way to explain it to you. You ain’t got the context. I’m not in damnation, in case you were worried about that. I’ll go someday, sooner than later.”

She takes hold of one of the last staples and yanks it free. She wishes she had better tools for the job; so many pieces of the Martian’s body are coming out with them and she doesn’t know enough about Martian biology to know the dead tissue from the live stuff. Whatever falls out, she has decided, is what is supposed to fall out. Unless Ruby breaks down the door screaming that her kinsperson’s death rattle is in her head, Vespa is going to commit to this strategy. 

“ ‘Vespa’.” he rolls the name around his tongue “Vespa Ai. Vespa Ilkay. Which one is it?”

“I kept both of ‘em.”

“What about your wife’s? No Aurinko?”

Should it surprise her that he knows about Buddy? Probably not. “Sometimes. It depends.”

“Is ‘Vespa’ after me?”

Vesper Ilkay was her father’s name. The ‘Ai’ is something unique to Rang- people take the names of their districts as middle names, as a way of placing yourself in the society and identifying those that might be friendly to you. Her name, although changed, sounded wrong and unsafe without ‘Ai’ knocking around in there.

Her arms burn. Sighing, Vespa pushes the visor up and leans on the edge of the bed with her elbow-deep gloves. She considers her Martian patient and the ruin of their body. They deserve her full attention, and she’s got to pace herself anyway. Might as well take a quick break and rest her arms and talk the ghost into leaving so she can work without distractions.

“Seemed like the natural thing to do.”

At the sight of her face, he grins. His teeth are browned by years of low-quality cigarettes. “Huh. So is it ‘Vesper’ or just ‘Vespa’?”

“Just ‘Vespa’.”

“Vesper’s unisex, y’know.”

“I know.” Vespa flings a lump of necrotic tissue over her shoulder at the slop bucket. It misses and squelches down the wall. “I just like ‘Vespa’ better.”

“Fair enough, Junior.”

She winces. “Oh, don’t call me that. Jesus, Baba, that’s awful.”

Vesper grins; at last, she is looking at his face. “I like it. You look good, kid. Like your mother.”

Vespa’s throat constricts. She sniffs and glances at Guapo, with his flaccid hairs in the slop bucket, appealing to him for strength. One of his eyes catches hers and holds it in a knowing way. He believes in her.

“I don’t know what mom looked like.”

“So find a mirror. She had black hair, though, when it wasn’t buzzed off. She was in a convent for a while.”

“A convent?”

“Yeah. Remember the Theravada Temple in the next district over from us? Your mom was determined to get ordained there. She was about to enter as a novice, but your grandmother got sick and she had to give that dream up to work. But she buzzed her hair a lot, I think, to remind her to carry around the teachings that she did manage to study. You look like your grandmother, too, by the way.”

“They had green hair?”

“Nah, but everything else. Swear to god your mom and grandmother were the same damn person. The Lord just pressed your grandmother’s face on a copy machine and told her that whatever got printed was her daughter.”

He stubs the cigarette out on the sole of his sandal and tucks the butt into his pocket, putting his back to the wall. His expression is hard to read. 

“You afraid of me now?”

Her nails want to dig into her palms and gouge at her scalp, but she won’t let them, and besides, she’s got thick gloves on. Breathe, Vespa. This is your medbay. Baba was dead this morning and he’ll be dead tonight, so just get through this moment and everything will go back to the way it should be.

“I don’t know how I feel about you. We don’t know each other that well. You never knew me as an adult.”

“But you knew me.”

“Yeah, Baba, and I loved you. Love you. I just…I’m not a kid anymore. I’m not anything like I was when I was born. I transitioned. I got married. I got shot and abducted and used by somebody I couldn’t just, cut up and run from. I got sick. My brain kind of turned against me.”

“Do you see me when you’re seeing things?”

“A lot.”

“And I’m mean?”

“You misgender me constantly and keep telling me I abandoned you.”

Vesper scowls. It’s weird, because that is an expression that Vespa thought was hers alone. She didn’t know she had inherited that hatchet-mark between his eyebrows and the canine way his lip curls. 

(Buddy)

Soup and Juno were made difficult witnesses by their severe states of shock, but they told a story that was coherent, if scattered. Martian asked for help by taking on the form of someone from Juno’s past (a dead sibling; Buddy knows that expression), Martian was located in a basement beneath the Wellness Centre surrounded by the preserved corpses of their kinspeople, Martian was either stashed in or discovered in a briefcase and carried out at the expense of Jet and Peter.   
Martians have got to be a rare commodity. Why the hell would anyone with the resources to abduct, secure and control a Martian in such a way allow that commodity to be taken away to a relatively isolated settlement, and apparently drained for its blood or an equivalent bodily fluid by a pack of randoms? Rich randoms, but still- randoms. Dark Matters and Kanagawa would have known about this Martian to have an army of that size at a close proximity. Their militias were mixed freely with each other- coordinated and familiar with each other. They would have had to be to pull off an evacuation and asset retrieval on the scale that the shuttle traffic suggested.

The pieces are in front of her. Buddy wills them to fit together, but she cannot think over the parrot-demon’s menacing squawks of her name and snack foods, nor can she ignore the blood, the texture of stale-syrup, going down the back of her neck and plastering hair to her forehead.  
God, she needs a fresh pair of eyes. She needs Vespa or Jet, but Vespa is hip-deep in Martian muck and Jet is triple-handcuffed to a hospital bed on a prison ship. 

Think, Buddy.

Buddy stands. At some point, the floor also changed to fingernails in here. She stamps her feet on them to get the blood flowing again, pacing the short length of her office. The demon’s fat head swings back and forth with her movements, clacking a beak made of bone and shaped like scissors. 

She starts to talk to herself. This shouldn’t be a problem unless Space-Hell cheats. “Right. Martian. Martian in the basement. Basement in the Wellness Centre. Wellness Centre in The Platonium, The Platonium in Dark Matters’ pocket, a Kanagawa cousin at the head of it…”

What is she missing?

Buddy fishes out the hannunvaakuna and turns it over in her fingers.

“Buddi…” 

A wet voice from the hallway. It sounds suspiciously close to the ground. She cannot help but glance after it and spots her sister, severed at the waist, dragging herself across the fingernails by her own with a skirt of entrails behind her. She stops in the doorway and waves her torn hands in Buddy’s direction 

“Buddi…why did you let me die, Buddi?”

Oh for the love of Lempo, Buddy thinks, this is just cartoonish.

Sportti died of a stroke in the seat of her tractor. The death was so peaceful and painless that she still had a cigarette butt in her mouth when the farmhands found her, still upright in the seat with a hand on the clutch, no less. If there is a death that better fit her sister’s general character and attitude towards life, Buddy cannot think of it. 

“Buddi…”

“Peanut! Cracker! Buddi want a cracker?”

“You abandoned us, Buddi…who will visit my grave now…”

Buddy snaps her fingers. “A control group! Gods! It was a control group!”

“-never forgive you, Buddi-”

“-peanut, peanut, peanut-”

“Of course! The Martians have got to be the source of the cure-mother,” Buddy quickens her step, obliging the demon to turn its head so fast she hears the bones groan in complaint. “Derived from a tissue, a plasma of some sort- the only one which was conscious must have been at the end of its lifespan of use if they would just put it in the corner like trash- and Ruby said they regenerate…it stands to reason that a clever team with financial backing like the Kanagawas could synthesise something stronger than whatever cheap imitation is on the market…a satellite makes perfect sense…rich people already love detoxes and essential oils, of course they’d be willing to drink undiluted Martian’s blood…”

Sportti makes a grab for her ankles. Buddy has to hop to avoid her and then, to keep Space-Hell off her scent, pretends she was clicking her heels for joy at her own genius.

“Partial transformation into a Martian is one hell of a side-effect, though.” 

Buddy sits down with her legs folded so that the projection of Sportti cannot claw at her. The blood leaking in through the ceiling increases in its intensity. It is now like a faucet open to an insistent drizzle that is aimed almost perfectly down the back of her flannel. Assuming this blood isn’t a hallucination, Buddy is also going to have to burn this shirt. 

So, she has found the source of the cure-mother. The ‘prime’ version is real, technically, but not as she imagined it would be. Not in a way that is immediately useful. It’s a place to start, at least. 

Buddy is just beginning to feel like some good may come of this awful day yet when, out of the corner of her eye, she sees something that quashes that seed of hope. A flicker of movement- familiar in its gait. She moves without thinking and looks after the figure. After him.

He is still there. Walking with a purpose, away from her, into the shadows at the back of the hall.

“Jet?”

(Vespa)

Vesper straightens up and moves out of the corner. Towards his daughter. 

“That’s bullshit. You left, girl, it’s what kids do if they can. I didn’t want you to go! I didn’t want to have to send my kid out into the shit of the world. In a perfect one you wouldn’t have had to leave just to survive, but Rang was about as far from perfect as it gets. This place, this place that thinks it’s a hell, it’s got nothing on what you and me grew up in. I didn’t want you to go but I wanted you to live, do you understand? To live well. To live happy. Looks to me like that’s what you did.”

Vespa’s voice breaks. Her face heats up. She’s going to cry no matter what she does. “You’re not mad?”

“No, girl. No.”

“Even though you thought I was- I never told you. I did this huge thing. I did this huge thing and I didn’t tell you because I was scared you’d hate me for it. I transitioned because I really, really fucking needed to, and I couldn’t tell my own fucking dad because I worried- I worried you’d be mad about it. I worried you’d think I hated you for raising me as a boy.”

His face softens into well-worn smile lines. His eyes are wet, too. “I didn’t raise you as a boy, Vespa. I raised you as my kid. My child. You tell me you needed to change some things about your body to be ok in it? Then it’s a good thing you did. I raised you for love and happiness, Vespa, and transitioning was a part of that. I’m so proud of you for finding that out and giving yourself that medicine. That gift.”

Casting her mask to the side, Vespa goes to him and embraces the shade of her father. He embraces her back, ignoring the blood on her apron and gloves.

She buries her face in his shoulder and lets out a sob that’s been in her for forty-three years. He strokes her hair, her mother and grandmother’s hair, holds her, and tells her what she should have known all along.

“I missed you. I love you.”

(Rita)

“’Hell is other people’.”

Ruby glances at Rita in askance; this is the first thing she’s said in an hour that hasn’t been a monosyllabic warning about something in their way or attempting to get into their way. 

Flying so low makes Rita nervous. She babbles when she’s nervous- more so than usual, and if she really gets into the swing of a good babble, she might slip up and acknowledge that the Jersey Devil’s been walking all over the goddamned auxiliary controls in the back like a cat on a keyboard. While the dimensional beast masquerading as her childhood fear chews on her head, Rita is sure she’ll curse her daddy with his dying breath for ever putting the stupid story in her brain in the first place.   
Goof of a man told that story over and over again, even as her much more realistic mother was in Rita’s other ear, telling her side of the story, in which her father was simply startled by a fat owl. 

So, to distract herself from the sound of goat-hooves and cougar-claws scraping over the temperature regulator and the back-up generator controls, Rita starts to read the graffiti.

Graffiti is one thing Rita didn’t think she’d see in hell. She figured that if there was a hell, people’d be too busy suffering to deface stuff- because this sure as shit ain’t art. The stuff that whips by her, scrawled in rusty liquid that’s probably blood or supposed to look like it, it’s stream-of-thought nonsense. The remains of the dramatic little theatre kid she once was whispers that it’s a collection of people’s dying words. Preserved on the crumbling walls of their purgatories- poetic!

Maybe that’s the effect Space-Hell and its interior designer are going for, but Rita is pretty sure that most people don’t gasp out fragments of Romantic poetry and quotes from the philosophic greats as they lay dying. In her experience, they’re asking for parents or cussing or bargaining aloud with God and the grim reaper. 

“S’on that hospital we just passed. ‘Hell is other people’.”

Ruby steers them around a two-story protrusion of the lava-rock. Its tip is shiny from all the ship bellies it must have scraped or pierced over the years. “What does that mean?”

“It’s philosophical. It’s like, we make our own hells, but we also make hell for other people while we’re doin’ it.”

“Where does that come from?”

“A Frenchman, I think. Somebody who had his fill of people.”

“It’s so weird to me that humans can get sick of each other. Martians don’t get sick of each other.” another swerve, this time around crystallised spires that reach from a cliff-face, almost hidden by the curve of the road. 

A headwind started up a half hour ago that’s determined to buck them into the narrow walls of the alley of rock. Ruby says that flying low attracts less attention. Besides, the low ceiling of Space-Hell has begun brooding with storm clouds. Rita doesn’t like being down here, what, with rocks and other unidentifiable shit constantly pinging off the windshield in a calculated attempt to break it open so Space-Hell can suck the CB’s occupants out like the squish out of a clam, but she doesn’t want to be up near those clouds when they dump whatever’s got them growling like that.

“How do you mean ya don’t get sick of each other?” asks Rita.

Ruby shrugs. “We’re made to live together, I guess. I mean obviously humans are too. Look at how quick you all fell in love with Guapo. You’re not even questioning what the hell he is or where he came from, and Vespa’s even letting him sleep in hers and Buddy’s room... but when a Martian strikes out alone, we can’t think as well as we normally do. When you grow up having other people in your head all of the time, it helps you parse the world out a bit. It’s like…humans, right, you guys are always in your own heads, always relying on your own senses, but a Martian can have eight or nine minds at their disposal at any given time. Say, if I had a problem like Vespa does- seeing things that are only there for me, I could call another Martian over and ask them if it was real. And they would see that it was real for me so no one would accuse me of making stuff up, or over-reacting to whatever I saw. Then they could use their own mind that wasn’t affected by the problem to tell it wasn’t real. Their mind and a few other people’s. Does that make sense?”

No. Maybe. Kinda? There were times in Rita’s teenage years where she felt that her brain was the only sanctuary from the world and her parents’ well-intentioned haranguing. She cannot imagine what she would have done if, after she’d stormed off and slammed her bedroom door, they had been able to continue asking about her grades, how that project for Robot Club was going.

“Yeah.”

Ruby grins. “You look horrified, Rita.”

“Sorry! I just don’t quite get it. I like bein’ the only person in my head. I can see how it might help some people with psychosis problems, but like, I also don’t appreciate th’ idea of bein’ babysat in my own brain by a bunch’a people.”

“Different contexts, I guess,” Ruby raises her voice slightly; the Jersey Devil has begun scratching at the fire-escape floorplan bolted to the wall, producing shrieks that makes the womens’ hair stand on end. “I missed it when I left. It was hard for me to think alone. For us, for Martians, thought is collaborative. Each one is like a mural that a dozen people are working on at the same time. Sure, you get paint on each other and somebody’s elbow is always gonna be in your ribs, but it makes the finished product stronger.”

“I gotta be honest, Ruby, I don’t think I could do that. I’d prefer ta paint a paintin’ that’s all me.”

She nods. “I think I understand. There was a while after Jet had just found me that I tried reaching out. When he was asleep, or when he was so concentrated on something that he was in a trance. It was getting to a point where I could send a thought to him, but…” 

“But what?”

Ruby slams on the brakes. Rita squeals and is snapped into place by her seat-belt before she cracks her head on the dashboard. The Jersey Devil is not so lucky, tumbled from its perch to the ground and through the wall. And they’re not slowing down by much. 

Now, Rita can see the shape in front of them- a pile as tall and wide as the gutter.

“Pull up!”

“I can’t! We’re going too fast- we’ll hit the ceiling-”

Rita does the first thing she can think of. Coincidentally the dumbest, too, but it gets results. 

Grabbing the emergency brake-lever, Rita yanks it backwards with all of her strength. The CB responds with an immediate tremor that shakes panels out of the ceiling and dims the lights. From somewhere deep inside the ship, the brakes scream, the engines cut and for a moment it is only momentum that keeps them aloft.  
Then the auxiliary coughs to life, and the nose-thruster on front of the ship is tripped and spews fire and fumes, pushing against the momentum until they have stopped.

The brakes fall silent. Only then does Rita realise she has been sustaining a feral bellow from the second she touched the brake.

Rita chokes on the bellow, on her own tongue. “Shit! Shit, shit, oh, I definitely just broke somethin’, I definitely just blew out one ‘a the damn engines-”

“Thank god you did!” Ruby wraps a shaky arm around Rita’s shoulder and pulls her into a hug. “I can’t believe- I just froze up. I almost didn’t see it.”

The ‘it’ is kind of charred thanks to the nose-thruster, but they have stopped only a few metres short of crashing into it, so the shapes are still familiar to Rita. Kinda familiar. At least, she can tell what they were trying to be. 

“Those are CameramenTM.”

Ruby squints through the glass. “What? Out here?”

“Look, they’re messed up. An’ not just ‘cos I sprayed ‘em with fire- look, that one’s got three heads an’ that one’s got all its insides on the outsides over its skin…an’ look at the way they fell. They got dropped in here. Dumped.”

“Oh,” Ruby’s face contorts with disgust and contempt. “Oh. These are…these are failed experiments, aren’t they?”

“Shit, Ruby. They’re all dead. An’ they’re smart, too. From what I’ve seen they’re at least as smart as dogs or dolphins.”

“There’s got to be a hundred of them…it makes sense, I guess. Cecil must have to experiment a lot to get what he wants. And there’s a little portal to Space-Hell right between Phobos and Deimos.”

Piled on each other. A mass grave in the open air. All manner of limbs and body types and bones poking through fur or skin or leather or metal. Big and small, thin and fat, with coherent bodies and bodies that look like a bunch of disparate shapes crammed together into a too-small flesh sack, which puts a special twist of nausea in her stomach because they remind her a bit of Guapo.   
Every single one of them has got a bolt between the eyes. A brass-coloured bolt, like the kind that comes out of a cross-bow. Rita imagines the CameramenTM lining up their maimed bodies against a wall so the father/master that slapped them together can kill them more conveniently. Going down the line. Aiming for each forehead. Aiming between every pair of eyes. 

Rita unclips her seat-belt, dashes for the incinerator and pukes into it.

While she wretches into the trash, Ruby tries to get the ship back into flying condition. Rita can tell just by the sound of the engine turning over that the sudden, violent manoeuvre, coupled with the prolonged low-altitude flying, has killed at least one of the poor things. Jet must be sitting up in a cold sweat, feeling the pain of his ship like his own. Knowing, somehow, that Rita’s put her little hands on something she shouldn’t have and created a big repair job for him when he gets back.

“Are you ok?”

Rita wretches a little more.

“Rita, I’m gonna need your booty back in the seat pretty quick here. Now that we’re stopped, the radar’s decided to work again. We’ve got someone behind us. Something moving at a ship-speed.”

“Don’t tell me-”

“I think Noorssen’s guy followed us in here.”

Wiping her mouth, she staggers back to her seat. Rita doesn’t raise her eyes from the dashboard because she knows she’ll start puking again if she has to look at those CameramenTM.  
“An’ now we’re just on the damn auxie. Can we make it?”

“We can try.”

Ruby steers them over the top of the pile, which is a good eight metres off the edge of the gutter. From above, Rita can see it’s not just the one pile. There has to be six or seven dumps of CameramenTM, spilling off into the runnels, into the scorched grass to become obstacles for the shades and the creatures that wander. A few of them are far off, by themselves, or in pairs. There are furrows, rust-coloured furrows. They dragged themselves. Tried to walk. Tried to help each other along. Unburied themselves and tried to find help or give help with gold bolts sprouting from their skulls…

“I could fix it up so that we can use the auxie as our third engine, but it would take a while. And you couldn’t fly in these conditions, could you?”

Rita has to take a deep breath before she can speak. “Naw, but you could talk me through the process.”

“I don’t think we’ve got the time for that. Besides, I don’t trust myself to drive on my own after I almost just crashed us. Are you sure you’re ok?”

Rita gives her a thumbs- up. “Oh, I’m gonna cry about this later. I’m gonna go grout the shower with my tears as soon as we’re outta direct danger.”

“That’s what I like to hear.”

The next thing they hear is not what they expect nor want to hear; a shot connecting with the back of the ship. A tinned thunderclap. The ship trembles. 

Rita slaps the screen of the radar. It fizzes, blinks and changes, showing them their pursuer is a whole lot closer than they should be. 

“Aw, fuck, I think our instruments have been hinky since we got here-”

“How bad? How much did we take?”

“Looks like they aimed for our undercarriage. Trying to knock the engines out of our belly.”

“Where the hell are our shields? I thought they were up!”

“They are! They cut through ‘em!”

They plunge back into the gutter, as does the ship on the radar. Rita checks the shield percentage and gasps at what she sees.

“It’s like- whatever hit us is fucken meltin’ our shields!”

“Noorssen,” growls Ruby, taking a corner at an angle that would make a pinball sick. “Fuck him and his stupid fucking high-tech weapons. Shit. How are we doing?”

“We’re at 87% an’ fallin’. It’s workin’ through the radiation shieldin’ too- shit, it went through everything like tissue paper! We got a hole 10 metres in the back that’s just gonna be the hull on bare space-” Rita breaks off into a scream as a second blow lands, this one much closer to the cockpit. 

“Now?”

“That knocked us to 71%- over the medbay too, shit. We’re gonna burn up if we try an atmosphere entry.”

“We can’t get to Phobos.”

Rita nods. Her eyes burn with frustration. “We ain’t gonna make it ten minutes in space. Let alone at this speed.”

“Ok. Fuck. We can’t go into space, so, so a detour. We need a detour. Where Dark Matters can’t follow us.”

“Earth!” Rita blurts “We have to get to Earth.”

(Buddy)

“Jet!”

She has caught up to him in a few strides that spray fingernails in all directions. Without thinking, grabbed him by the wrist with both hands. The flesh becomes real beneath her hand. The man turns about with a gasp and tries to wrench away from her, but Buddy is stronger. 

But the instant she gets a proper look at him, the illusion is broken. This is not Jet. This is someone very much like him. A sibling’s resemblance. Change the hairline, the bones in his face, shrink him by a couple of kilos and centimetres. Almost Jet. 

The man continues to struggle, growing panicked, and gesturing to the dark at the back of the hall, which has begun to stir. “Let go of me! They’re going to notice you!”

Jet does not talk about his family. For a good reason. He treats their names as if they are cursed that burn his mouth on the way out. Three siblings. Which one of them is this?

She hazards a guess. “Emanoraq?”

His arm slackens. The man narrows his eyes.

Aware that the darkness has now become a tall, thing with cloven feet and horns that scrape the ceiling, Buddy tries again. “Arcady?”

“Who are you?” 

“You’re Yuka-James, aren’t you?”

He winces at the sound of his name. “You’re about to bring a whole lot of shit down on your head, lady. You really need to stop talking to me.”

“Is Jet here? Your brother. Is he-”

“Is he dead? No. He was kind of close for a day, but-”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know! I’m dead, not omniscient!”

“I thought the dead were supposed to be looking down on their survivors!”

At last, YJ wrenches free of her grasp, rubbing his wrist as if she burned it. She can tell by his face that she has just touched a nerve. “If you know Jetty then you know why I had to stop watching.”

Buddy’s turn to cringe, on Jet’s behalf. “Well maybe you should check in now and again.”

“I don’t owe him the benefit of the doubt!”

YJ turns and stalks off, cradling his arm, and giving a wide berth to the horned thing approaching Buddy now.

“You better run, by the way.” YJ gestures to the thing “This guy is mean. He’ll shred you like a kid with playing with grass.”

“Oh I think not, darling. Now, you run along if you’re not going to be of any help.”

Buddy draws the ulu from the back of her belt. Not her weapon of choice, but she can sense that a gun’s not going to do her much good. 

YJ’s mouth drops open at the sight of the knife “Hey! Why do you have my mom’s-”

“I said scat!”

He doesn’t need to be told twice. 

Buddy draws the ulu back and prays that she will not break Jet’s pilfered heirloom. Please, let him have something to come back to if he’s still alive. The demon reaches for her.

At which point the wall explodes between them, a grappling hook the size of Buddy gouges itself into the ground. The air shimmers. There’s a sound of a helium balloon being inflated and a tunnel of blue energy suddenly extends from the hole, through the Carte Blanche’s hull, and into that of the ship evidently pursued them all the way here. 

“Oh for Christ’s sakes!” Buddy yells. “Can we not catch a break! Please, gods, can we not catch a break?”

The demon leaps over the enormous grappling hook and slams Buddy to the ground. Fingernails scrape the back of her neck and catch in the gore that coats her from scalp to ankle. She slams the ulu into the demon’s thick wrist. A hiss of pain or annoyance, and then a glancing blow to her temple that knocks stars into her eyes. Huge hands wrap about her throat. 

And finally, Buddy loses her temper. 

(Rita)

“What was-”

“Grapplin’ hook.”

“What?”

“We’re bout’a get boarded, Ruby. If you got a detour in mind ya better take it.”

“Do you trust-”

“YES! JUST GET US THE HELL OUTTA HELL!”

In seconds they are out of the gutter, going slower because of the extra weight they’re dragging. At least the other ship isn’t trying to drive them off in another direction. Small mercies. 

Rita squeezes her arm-rests, trying not to pass out. The other ship is hanging off of them by a boarding-tunnel and a goddamned grappling hook. Noorssen is really determined to have his chat with Buddy. 

Ruby is climbing. Taking them up to the low belly of the storm-clouds. For a second Rita thinks she’s going to smash them straight through the thunder-heads, but Ruby spins around at the last second, the poor auxiliary engine screaming in protest, and plunges them into a nose-dive.

“Oh, what, you give up on life now? You gonna take ‘em with us?”

“Don’t get hysterical! You said you trusted me!”

Rita glances between Ruby and their destination, rushing up to meet them “I did until two seconds ago when ya started nose-divin’ us into a fuckin’ crack in th’ ground!”

“Rita, relax-” but Rita has started screaming.

Seeing that Rita is not about to be talked down, Ruby puts on the cruise-control, holds the steering wheel steady and clasps Rita’s hand. She is seized and squeezed so hard you’d think Rita was trying to juice a fruit. But Ruby bears it. Holds them steady. Drives them home, into a crack between the two runnels and hopes that the tearing of metal she can hear is not the Carte Blanche, but its dogged pursuer being torn away at last. 

(Elsewhere)

His first thought, on hearing the explosion, is that he has just killed his husband.

Finally, the catastrophe that Damien predicts every time he glances in on the alchemist’s sprawl in the basement, that catastrophe has been realised and is even now vibrating from the foundations of the Keep. 

God, thinks Arum, flinging his book down, God forgive me, Rilla forgive me, you’ve only been out of the house for two days and I’ve already killed our husband.

But Damien is right where Arum left him a half hour ago: dozing on the couch in front of a pulpy Spacer movie, sound off, captions on, and him completely asleep with his back bent at an impossible sideways angle. Unharmed.

Arum switches ‘Andromeda’ off and taps his husband on the shoulder with the remote until he stirs. The after-shocks of the explosion are still shaking dust and pollen from the ceiling. The Keep, too, begins to stir, awoken from a trance-like state which the sapient-plant equivalent of taking a nap. A tendril of vine extends from the wall to pet Arum on the head, as groggy and confused as Damien is.

_Put your aids in,_ Arum signs.

_Why?_ Damien sits up

_Sounds like a nuclear bomb just dropped in the front yard._

That gets him moving. Almost as if to prove the point, a second explosion sounds off as Damien is putting his hearing aids in. This one is deeper. Heavier. Closer, too. Definitely coming from the jungle outside, and now accompanied by a roaring that surrounds the Keep so that its direction is impossible to guess. 

Arum goes to the western windows while Damien goes to the eastern. The roaring is so intense now that it drowns out most of the uproar in the jungle, now, of the animals’ surprise at this interruption to what was a placid evening. Leaning over the window-sill, Arum spots the source of the disturbance almost immediately; a pair of dragons are locked in a death-spin over the lake.

No- not dragons. It’s been so long since Arum last saw a spaceship that his mind just jumped to the largest flying thing he sees on a regular basis. Two of them attached by an elastic tunnel of blue energy. The explosions are coming from the larger ship’s underside. There is a great rent, there, spewing flame and oil so that fire is being rained down on the surface of the lake and floating there, to the annoyance of the ducks. 

Whoever is in the bigger ship is doing an admirable job of not crashing into the jungle. With their passenger hanging on stubbornly, the ship propels itself with one last roar of dying engines to a fringe of sand and dried seaweed. A softer crash.   
One that won’t add flooding to the ship’s many problems. 

“Come on,” whispers Arum. “You can make it.”

The ship wobbles in the air. It drops by a few metres, its flaming belly now in the water so that a flaming oil-slick is left in its wake.

“Come on!”

The ship lurches upwards. Out of the water. It sketches out a clumsy, fiery parabola and smashes home, pluming sand and seaweed into the air. 

Arum almost passes out from relief. “Oh, thank God. Let’s just hope you survived that.”

“Whoa! What the – by the Saints! By the holy Saints!” Damien is beside him, suddenly, leaning so far out of the window that Arum cannot help but grab him by the belt. “Merciful Damien! What a mess! Fire on the lake- what a- Arum, what happened?”

Arum pulls his husband inside the rest of the way. “I believe aliens have just crashed in our yard. Aliens, or Spacers, that is?”

Damien shakes his head and signs _These sort of oddities always seem to find us when Rilla is gone, don’t they?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Skipped trigger summaries  
> Buddy’s parts: she puts it together that the cure-mother prime is probably derived from a bodily fluid of the Martian’s, encounters a ghost that proves to be YJ, Jet’s dead brother, then watches as the ship is attacked and boarded by the pursuer that Noorssen sent after them. Buddy appears to be fine, but has "lost her temper"
> 
> Vespa’s parts: her father appears as a ghost, talks about where she has ended up in life and addresses her psychosis episodes where he appears to misgender her. He tells her that he is proud of her who she has become, for transitioning too and that he loves her. 
> 
> Almost cried writing that passage between Vespa and her dad. I sat down to outline this chapter and mentioned something vague about Vespa seeing her dad. I don’t know what exactly happened between the note ‘Vespa gets a visit from her dad’ turned into ‘beat Vespa with the catharsis stick’ and here we are, and here I am, attempting not to bawl. Also, when I said put ‘ensemble’ for the character tag, I meant that everybody from the Penumbra Podcast would be here. Like, everybody.


	15. Yeah right, Sasha

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: mentions of drug addiction/detox, mentions of drug use, mentions of medically transition/ top surgery, mentions of arson, mentions of anaesthesia, prison setting, medical coma, medical equipment including needles/IVs
> 
> Jet finally gets a chance to catch up on some much needed sleep. As we don't know much canonically about what the broader strokes of Jet's career were, I've filled in a few possibilities. I apologise to all of the astrophysicists/ folks with common sense that I'm going to offend with his crime against Saturn.  
>  Also, my 'eat the rich' sentiments are really coming to the foreground here. 
> 
> Suggested listening: The Animal Collective ‘In the flowers’

(Four-ish years ago, the Cerberus Province, Jet and Buddy’s townhouse)

“Jetffrey, are you aware of the sad man eating frozen yoghurt on the chaise-lounge?”

Buddy has just walked into the kitchen with one bag of groceries and another of pilfered loot, which was her main errand today. 

“Yes,” Jet puts a chopping board on a rack beside the sink and kisses Buddy’s scarred cheek in greeting. “The house-guest, as we discussed.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, darling, I remember the discussion. I’m just confused as to…why is he eating frozen yoghurt-”

“With a satin eye-mask on? He told me it was so he did not catch a glimpse of his reflection and feel shame in what he has been reduced to.” Jet takes the grocery bag from her, rinsing the vegetables in the sink.

“Ah,” Buddy nods with a weary knowing. “A break-up. The poor thing. He’s plugged himself into some awful screechy music as well. He didn’t even realise I’d walked through the room. I don’t know him, do I?”

“Nope.”

“Although you assure me he is prolific, in his own way.”

“Yes.”

“I thought I might at least know him on sight, but I am sure I’ve never seen him before. I would remember him. I would remember those legs, at least, and those pretty hands of his.”

Jet nods. 

“You really aren’t going to give me a name, are you?

Jet stows the vegetables in the fridge “I gave you a name.”

“The nickname of your childhood dog. I meant a real, human name.”

He responds with a shrug. “I’ve never asked. ‘Pakak’ has always suited my needs just fine. If he decides he would prefer to respond to something else, then I will be open to revisions.”

Grinning, Buddy nudges Jet in the side with her elbow. “Such a gentleman. All secrets are safe with you, aren’t they?”

“Absolutely not. I’ve told everyone at the market about your sordid obsession with reality TV.”

Buddy gestures to the other bag, which she discarded for her gentle interrogation. “Well, I must be off again. Back to the fence.”

“And they were genuine?”

“Oh, yes, genuine Martian grave-goods. Turns out they liked to wear gold as well.”

“And you have ten kilos of it?”

Buddy nods. “Ten whole kilos of genuine grave-goods. I don’t know where those collectors got such an enormous amount from. There must be a necropolis on Mars that hasn’t been made public. Either way, the archaeologists and xeno-anthropologists are going to be pissing themselves if any of it ever makes it out of the black market. What? Too crude?”

He shakes his head. “Did you have to use the good tote bag to carry it all?”

“What on earth do you mean, darling?”

“That’s the sturdiest bag we have. If I use anything else to carry parts around, the seams will be splitting by the end of the day. Now there’s dead Martian matter inside of it.”

“They died millennia ago, Jet, I’d guess we’re safe. I should be home in a week if all goes well. You won’t still be here, will you?”

“Probably not, no. I should be out on Ixion by then seeing to that business with Chiara by this weekend, but some of that depends upon how Pakak feels. I don’t want to push him.”

“Push him? Hasn’t he been luxuriating in a pool of his own sorrow ever since he got here?”

This is the first Buddy has seen of Pakak. She has been out on a job, which makes Jet happy, small and tentative though it may be, and divorced from any actual stealing for herself. This month she has been a neutral third-party entrusted to split up the wealth of an enormously lucrative heist of a collector’s horde, and to make sure that the division is even. Buddy has just paused the whirlwind of item appraisals and fact-checking and putting out fires to glance in on Jet. Also, he assumes, to get a look at Pakak and determine whether or not he poses some kind of threat that Jet has so far missed. 

The resident housecat investigating the rescue kitten.

“It is rare for Pakak to allow himself to experience the fullness of his emotions. I am just happy that he has chosen to do it.”

“Although our upholstery may suffer for it. Right. Kiss me goodbye, darling, and remember me fondly if I happen to die while I’m away.”

“Try not to.”

A half hour after Buddy has taken her leave, Jet is finished in the kitchen and goes to check Pakak for a pulse. 

In Jet’s experience, after a glancing blow like a bad break-up or unemployment is dealt to someone, one of the first instincts is to go home. If the world has been kind enough to provide you with a safe one, that is. Jet left the home that produced him in a spectacularly destructive fashion and has done a few other things to ensure that he couldn’t go back. He is fortunate for the second chance that Buddy gave him to create a home, although, thinking about it, perhaps this is a third chance, or a continuation to the true second chance of his life, chronologically speaking, which came along with Pakak.  
Thinking critically about who he is and what he means to Pakak has never been a part of their relationship. To try to assess the value of one’s presence in the life of a man whose survival is predicated on not having a life is to invite heartbreak. Which is a mouthful to say and a headache to think about- so Jet doesn’t think about it. A strategy he copied from Pakak, if he is honest with himself. 

They talk, they text, Jet is sent things in the mail and sends things back when Pakak has a P.O. box. For a few short spans of time, they have lived together; once, Pakak needed a roommate to make an alias more believable. Jet was asked only to potter around in the background of an apartment to make it look like it was shared, but he also ended up teaching Pakak to cook. On the second day of their cohabitation, Jet watched the man dump a can of tuna into a tub of wasabi, stir it, and it eat with a spoon. It was either teach Pakak to cook or kill Pakak with his bare hands to prevent another such crime.  
When the war between Pakak’s dysphoria and fear of anyone getting their hands on a DNA-rich tissue sample of his was decided, dysphoria being the victor, Jet was there for the whole process. He took Pakak to a clinic, then to a safehouse where they were roommates for the month that it took for the scars to stop smarting, and for Pakak to be able to lift his arms above his head. Jet also went back and flattened the clinic with an industrial crane, then destroyed its digital patient records. Just in case. 

As for Jet? Well, when Jet was going through his final detox (please, God), Pakak may not have been physically present, but he wouldn’t leave Jet the hell alone. If they were not talking then Pakak was texting him. Memes, cat videos, dog videos, seal videos, more memes, political memes, a photo of an Earthling horse that Pakak claimed had Jet’s hair. Incessant. Stupid. Comforting in its incessant stupidity. Every time the junk-ache had gotten to the point where Jet wanted to just give up, just try again next year, he thought about that stupid goddamned horse and about all the other nonsense Pakak would send him on the next detox, about how there might be an endless number of animals and things that kind of do look like they’ve got his hair- and that pushed him through. 

And now, in the midst of Pakak’ latest personal difficulty, he has appealed to what worked for him in the past. Pakak needs to feel safe. So he goes to one of the few places in the universe where he knows he can be safe. 

Apparently, that is wherever Jet happens to be. The closest thing Pakak has to a home. Jet won’t pretend that accepting this has been easy. For him, accepting love has never been easy. It bumps and scrapes against old wounds. The oldest wounds he has.

But Pakak trusts Jet enough to weep into his couch, so Jet has got to trust Pakak not to dig his fingers into those old wounds. On purpose. 

Pakak is still where Buddy found him. Stretched out on the chaise lounge, masked, one hand dangling over the side clutching an empty fro-yo container. A perfect image of grace as usual.

Leaning over Pakak, Jet lifts a corner of the eye-mask. “Alive in there?”

“Just about.” Pakak turns onto his side, putting his back to Jet. “What time is it?”

“Tuesday.”

“Hilarious.”

“How do you feel today?”

Pakak talks into the upholstery. “Same as yesterday. Torn asunder. Cast aside. At the same time, tempered with a resignation to my fate, an acknowledgement that perhaps I pushed a fragile person too far in too short a time.”

“I meant your spoons.”

“Oh,” Pakak shrugs. “Fine. I’m fine. It’s hardly registering today.”

“Excellent. Get off the couch, then. You haven’t seen the sun in four days and I’m beginning to worry you’ll develop bedsores.”

“No, thank you. I’m quite comfortable in my groove.”

Picking up one end of the chaise lounge, Jet lifts and moves as if to tip Pakak onto the floor. Pakak springs up and dashes for the guest-room where his things are, swearing over his shoulder. 

“Dress for a walk!” Jet calls.

“A walk? In this climate? Are you trying to hasten my death?”

“Jeans and sturdy shoes.”

Fifteen minutes and a quick shower later, Pakak shuffles back into the living room, presentable for the first time in days. He wears what Jet thinks of as his ‘murder-jeans’, the one pair he does not mind staining with blood or other fluids, a long-sleeved flannel and one of the two pairs of flats he regularly wears. Of course, there is a face-mask and a baseball cap pulled low to disguise his identity. As if anyone in Cerberus looks twice at each other.

“You look like a farm-hand. Or a rich boy runaway who’s trying to blend in with the working-class members of the artists’ collective he just joined.”

“And you look like a substitute teacher who wishes he’d pursued his dreams of building monster trucks.”

They take a moment to laugh at each other. Jet can tell that Pakak has already begun to feel a little bit better as he takes Jet’s arm and, grudgingly and grinning, allows himself to be taken out into the world once more. 

(Mick, now)

In the small hours of the morning, Mick is awoken by the deep, animal fear that someone is hanging over him while he sleeps. He is correct. It is Diamond.

“Sir, you’re needed-”

Mick screams and whacks them in the face with his pillow.

“-at Hoosegow.”

Mick is still not accustomed to the idea that just anyone can and will walk into his bedroom, least of all someone who cuts the exact same silhouette as his most regular nightmare-demon. 

Ever since they moved him into the mayoral suite, Mick has been woken up at odd hours of the night by Sasha, Min Kanagawa, Cecil Kanagawa and even his goddamned secretary, Francesca Nguyen, who has taken to letting herself into his living quarters whenever she needs a signature. Just yesterday she thrust a pad behind his shower curtain and asked if he could sign off on the economic plan for next year, which obliged Mick to sit on top of the toilet lid for an hour, in a bathrobe, talking it through with his advisors to make sure he understood what he was singing off on, and then dictating revisions to Francesca, whom he’d banished outside, because he doesn’t think it’s appropriate to be even semi-naked in front of his members of staff. There’s a standard he’s got to uphold. A standard he’s created for himself, sure- Hyperion City mayors are as famous for taking advantage of their close staff as they are for dying in weird ways, but Mick is determined to break that cycle.

He just wishes that he could do it without Diamond breathing down his neck. Yeah, he understands that they’re just doing what a bodyguard is supposed to. Guarding his body. But the more time Mick spends with them, the more he feels that the Kanagawas and Sasha have entrusted him to the wrong person. Something about them makes Mick anxious each time they are alone together- which is disconcertingly often. Something that makes Mick dismiss Diamond outside while he gets dressed, although he could have just asked them to turn around. 

The clock, a gorgeous antique which Mick has already managed to get some gum on, tells him it’s 1:30 in the morning. Mick spots it when he’s got one leg in one jean-sleeve (the wrong one) and asks Diamond what is on fire.

“I believe, sir, the Kanagawas are going to issue a statement about the Unnatural’s presence in Hoosegow and they would like your input. Captain Khan is there, too, so it’s probably going to be a strategy meeting.”

Mick clips his belt, then un-clips it, realising he has put it on inside out. “About the satellite settlers too?”

Diamond pauses. “What about them, sir?”

“Figuring out what we’re going to do about them. What we’re going to say about them.”

“I don’t believe the Kanagawas plan to acknowledge their involvement in that particular chapter of the Unnatural’s retrieval, sir. Besides, the satellite settlers are under Dark Matters’ jurisdiction. They were participants in their experiment-”

“Which the Kanagawas funded. And continue to fund. They’re really not going to talk about it, huh? The fact that we’ve got some two hundred people transformed or half-transformed into actual, real life Martians- you know what? I’ll be mad about it when I actually get to Hoosegow. Lead the way, Diamond.”

From the minute he heard that the Unnatural Disaster was at last captured and on his way to Mars, Mick knew he was in a shit load of trouble, and that most of it was going to be Sasha’s fault. Not that he can blame her for every single one of the threads of lies and dark-money deals that he can feel tightening about them- Sasha is just as caught in this web of conspiracy as he is. But she isn’t struggling against it like Mick is. She seems to be biding her time, inching closer to the spider at the centre even as she tells Mick there is nothing to worry about if only he does his job right.  
Yeah right, Sasha. 

What surprised him is that most of the trouble has not come from the Unnatural, who has apparently been a model prisoner, either sleeping or moving so little that he might as well be asleep. Fair enough. His arm was almost off when he got here. Probably takes a while to recover from that kind of a wound. Mick is relieved, at least, that he hasn’t got a loose canon making trouble in the city’s biggest prison, but he is also worried about what the man might be percolating during his recovery.  
The Unnatural Disaster is one of those big-name, big-crime guys whose name has never been lower than in the top-five of the Solar government’s most wanted. By all rights he should be going to the Intergalactic Courts over on Titan. The Titanic Super-Max made a special isolation cell specifically for him after he poured twenty kilos of straight cocaine into the atmospheric regulator of Central Jupiter about twelve years ago. 

Apparently, you can still get a little high if you stand outside with your mouth open under a heavy rainstorm. 

Almost every settlement of significant size has some similar complaint about the UD: he assassinated the King of Pluto at the inaugural ceremony; he broke into the First Settlers’ Museum on Neptune and stole all the foundational documents, which he then purportedly used to roll joints; he hacked into the database Venus’s government and released several thousand classified military documents to the public, who then rioted so hard they ended up deposing the government before server control was restored; he hacked into Uranus’s public infrastructure databases and changed the signs so that the word “mom’s” appeared between the ‘r’ and the ‘a’ as soon as the clocks ticked past midnight.

His most heinous crime of all was reserved for Saturn. What the Unnatural did to Saturn was so bad that the insult is still remembered and commemorated by a planet-wide day of mourning that shuts down all the schools and businesses. Somehow, he stole one of the goddamned rings. Apparently, he did it for the sheer joy, too! He never issued a ransom demand. To this day, the ring remains lost. 

In Mick’s opinion, which he may or may not have screamed down a comms at Sasha when she informed him that the Unnatural was on his way, to bring him here was to invite trouble that Mars has so far escaped. 

The Unnatural rarely ever went past the asteroid belt that separates Jupiter and Mars, content to mess with the dwarf planets, the TNO’s, the Big Four and the Outer-Rim. That job on Venus was probably an exception because of the ripe political situation he found he could take advantage of.  
Mars, owing to its size and proximity to Earth, is thought of as kind of a back-water planet- a relic from the first, clumsiest days of settlement. Martian public infrastructure is so poor that it can barely sustain its own population from region to region. The idea that a Martian jail is somehow equipped or qualified or has any business just looking at the Unnatural Disaster is a joke. A bad one, at that. 

As Mick climbs into the back of the laser-proof mayoral truck/tank, he tries to guess what the punchline of this joke is going to be. Will Mars have cocaine dumped into its atmospheric regulators? Will the Unnatural take down some prolific citizen? Because if an assassination is on his mind, Mick has a few suggestions…

Diamond drives. The roads are quiet. This district, sticking out over the urban sprawl of Hyperion like a toadstool on a tree-trunk, is reserved for those who work in the judicial-municipal infrastructure. As is traditional, Mick moved into the mayoral residence the night after his election. He spent most of that night wandering the rooms, sleepless, fuming at Sasha, and counting the bathrooms to take his mind off of it. It is an enormous place. It would have been a mansion but for the space constraints that arise from being installed on a cliff-face. Still, it is bigger than all five of the apartments Mick has ever lived in combined. The pantry alone is bigger than Mick’s childhood bedroom.  
Watching Hyperion City through the window of a private car is not something he is used to yet. He doubts he will ever get used to it and doesn’t particularly want to. Not like this, anyway. If Mick had any say about it then he’d just use his bike to get around, but the Kanagawas are convinced he’s going to be murdered by a political rival at the first opportunity. Hell, with his bike in the state that it’s in Mick might die just from trying to change gears too suddenly. 

At least it would be honest to who he is. At least it would be fair to the rest of Hyperion City. The longer Mick is in office, the further he feels himself drift from his home and the people who form it. One of them in particular.

Taking his comms out of his pocket, Mick opens it to the missed-calls and counts the ones from an unknown number. Really, it shouldn’t have been able to get through to him. You need like five levels of security clearance to get to the personal comms of the mayor. Which means it’s definitely Juno- Rita must have helped him get through. He has got ten missed calls from this number spaced out over the last three days and is sure that Juno’s pulling out his braids. Without warning, he’s suddenly seeing Mick streamed from the mayoral office, butting heads with the municipal officials for the reforms he wants to put through. Cecil Kanagawa is never far from his side these days. It’s gotten to the point that some of trashier tabloids are calling it a romance- which it isn’t. Mick isn’t into men, and if he was, he would not be into Cecil Kanagawa, being that he likes his spinal column where it is right now.

Mick didn’t talk to Juno about any of this before he committed to it. How he would explain himself, Mick does not know. Doesn’t know if there is an explanation apart from- hey, Sasha asked me if I wanted to try, and I thought, ok, let’s see if I can get the change-ball rolling and for sure something is rolling, but it all got out of hand so fast, Juno.  
Did he make a mistake? He doesn’t know. Does he wish he never put himself in this position? He wishes he never put himself in this place with Juno, where Mick is too afraid to call him because it turns out that lying to Juno is really, really easy, easy when you’re Mick Mercury, because of all the people in the cold, cruel universe who are going to lie to Juno, why would it be the wash-out, dumb-fuck best friend who never left his home-town, let alone Mars?

So he keeps inventing excuses to not call Juno back. Sasha doesn’t bring him up and neither does Mick and that’s the way it is, for the moment, whether or not the situation is sustainable. Sooner or later Juno Steel is going to kick in a door and demand to know what the fuck Mick thinks he is doing, at which point Mick intends to burst into tears and yell back that he has no fucking idea. 

Ten minutes later, Diamond and Mick have entered Hoosegow via the dark, armoured back-entrance that important visitors and the upper-echelons of prison staff use to get around. It gives them access to a series of covered fly-overs which can be used to get to anywhere in Hoosegow without ever having to walk on the same ground as the prisoners. Inside, it is dark except for a few floor-lights for the guards who patrol. By these faint lights Mick can make out the figures of prisoners turning over in their bunks, or dead asleep. He wishes the lights were on. A few of his friends are in here right now and it would be nice to be able to wave.  
Soon, they have reached the central column of a panopticon, where a disinterested guard scans their security passes and points them in the direction of the Unnatural Disaster’s room. He is far, far away from the gen pop’s hospital. A clinic has been improvised out of an old evidence locker that was in the middle of being refurbished when the Kanagawas, the indisputable owners of Hoosegow, had their unexpected stroke of luck. This is the first time the UD has ever been caught long enough to be incarcerated, so there is no telling how he might behave once inside. The only thing to do is keep him high and isolated where he can be watched.

As Mick is psyching himself up to parlay with one of the most dangerous intergalactic criminals of them all, he forgets to worry about the more localised criminals- until it is too late and Cecil Kanagawa has sprung from the shadows mere metres from the safety of Mick’s goal.

“Oh, good morning Mick!” 

Candidate number #1 for the Unnatural’s consideration!

Mick’s flight or fight response kicks in. An impulse to fling himself through the plexiglass of the fly-overs and lock himself in a cell. What he does is paste a welcoming smile on and let Cecil hug him. He smells like cologne splashed over blood, which probably means his mother pulled him out of some late-night experiment to attend this impromptu meeting at the Unnatural’s sickbed.

“Hey bud. What’s, uh, what’s going on? Why are we here so late?”

Cecil shrugs and falls into step beside him. “Oka-san called me from Hoosegow. She said something about a statement, tomorrow, about why we’re keeping the Unnatural Disaster- which reminds me! Mick, you haven’t seen him yet, have you?”

Mick has not and would like very much to keep it that way. 

Seeing the concern on his face, Cecil loops his robotic arm through Mick’s and pats him in a way that might be comforting, if Mick wasn’t also sure that Cecil was also imagining what Mick would look like with a pincers instead of hands. 

“Oh, don’t worry! He’s not up to doing much. You’ll be fine.”

In spite of what he has been hearing about how still and well-behaved the Unnatural has been since he got here, Mick was still expecting (hoping?) that there would be some vigour in the man. Some ferocity. If not a giant bucking against Lilliputian chains with rage-froth and blood flecking his lips, then a smooth, purring mastermind with a falcon on his wrist and a rhyming list of horrible things he planned to do to Hyperion City.

He got the giant part right. The rest, however, is almost disappointing in its mundane humanity.

The Unnatural Disaster is a tall, large-framed Earthling with a princess-like quantity of grey hair, braided so it is out of the way of the machinery that goes in and out of him with an alarming regularity. Beneath a plastic breathing mask, he has even, smooth features and a killer set of cheekbones, framed with about a week and a half’s beard. Rounding it off is a jawline that makes Mick want to rock-climb or put his fist through some drywall. 

And he is dead asleep. 

Mick has to stare for a minute. Who the hell is this? This isn’t an intergalactic criminal. This is the mechanic who checks your oil and judges you silently for using a bargain-bin brand. This is the neighbour who does all of his own yard work safely and competently, up to and including tree surgeries. This the stranger in the grocery store who looks just friendly enough that you would ask for his help to get something off a high shelf, but not so friendly that you’d have to worry about being dragged into an awkward conversation.  
Not that he isn’t still intimidating to look at. Those are the biggest biceps Mick as ever seen. Mick has no doubt that if the UD wanted to, he could put Mick’s head between his bicep and forearm, flex, and crack Mick’s head open like a walnut shell. Though he is obviously quite muscular, most of him is lost and buried in medical equipment. 

The silvered head of a truly enormous needle pokes out of one of his arms. Above that needle is a compression bandage, allowing for a skin graft to heal up and settle. There are a few rows of stitches where a stent had to be inserted to prevent his veins from collapsing entirely and, overall, a pretty raw look to the whole arm, as if it did its level best to fall off of him and is now sulking at being made to stay where it is.

“Wow.” says Mick. 

Cecil squeezes past him and sits down in a chair that’s pulled a little too close to the bedside. Belatedly, as transfixed as he was by the incredible incongruity of the man Mick imagined and the man that’s actually in the bed, Mick notices that the other two Kanagawas are here. Cassandra with her prison jumpsuit cuffed and torn just so, as far away from Min as she can be without climbing the wall, who looks amazing in spite of the late hour. Each woman acknowledges him with a nod of the head, then scowls at the other for copying her even though they did it in unison. 

Cecil takes no notice of his sister and mother. “Right? He’s got the most amazing hair. The doctors wanted to cut it shorter to get it out of their way, but I made it clear that there would be some serious repercussions if they did.”

Min gestures to a chair beside her. “Take a seat, Michael. We’re just waiting on our fifth.”

He stays standing. “Fifth? Who’s the fifth?”

“Captain Khan from the HCPD. You remember him.”

“Sure, sure. Nice guy. Been arrested by him a few times, in fact. Look, Mrs Kanagawa-”

“I’ve told you to call me Min.”

“You sure have. Mrs Kanagawa, I’ve got to say I’m pretty worried about those satellite settlers that came in with him.”

Min has brought a compact out of her pocket and is examining the slight bags beneath her eyes. “How generous of you.”

Oh, so this is how she wants to play it? Fine.

“I wouldn’t call it generous. I would call it the bare minimum of basic decency. I would call it doing my job.”

Cass lets out a long, dramatic sigh. “It’s too early to squabble, guys. And the Unnatural is right there. Don’t air out your grievances in front of him. Coma patients hear stuff that’s happening around them, you know-”

Mick rounds on her so fast she actually jumps up, like she thought he was going to hit her. “Coma? I’m sorry, coma?”

“Medical coma,” says Min. “The doctors wouldn’t touch him otherwise. They’re petrified of him.”

“Who wouldn’t be? If he can steal a ring off of Saturn he could probably steal your teeth out of your head without touching you.” adds Cecil, somewhat dreamily.

“Is that what the mask is?”

“Calm down. It’s just enough to keep him under. Non-opioid too. We wouldn’t want to ruin his sobriety for him. Anyway, I want him lucid. We’ve also got an anti-atrophy machine on him so he can lay there for as long as necessary without losing his strength, or muscle mass-”

“For what, Min? What are you gonna do? Offer him a job?”

Min shuts her compact. “I intend to make his circumstances clear to him and offer him a way in which they might be improved. Whether or not he decides to accept that offer is up to him. For the time being, our plan is to report that the Unnatural died in transit. Perhaps of his wounds. Perhaps there was a member of our medical staff who held a personal vendetta against him. Either way, he will be declared dead so that we may use him more easily.”

“Oh, great, well, I’m sure the Unnatural will just be tripping over himself to play general for, for the army of Martian-ised satellite settlers you’ve got locked up under your house!”

“They’re not under the house! That’s where my labs are. No, we’ve got them tucked away in this nice little facility just a kilometre out from Hoosegow- ouch!”

Cassandra has reached across the Unnatural to pinch her brother’s arm. “Shut up, Cecil.”

He shakes her off. “You could have just said for me to shut up! What are you pinching me for? We’re adults! Use your words, or your butterfly knife.”

“This is inhumane. You know that, right? You can’t just keep him drugged until it suits you to wake him up. Has he really been under like this for two weeks?”

“Yes. He will continue to be under until such a time as I decide that I am ready to deal with him. As you said, Michael, you’re worried about the satellite settlers? Well you would not believe the headache they’ve been. By the way, most of them signed waivers in the event of something like this. They were aware that, in the case of some…significant side-effects, they might be taken in for further study.”

“But did you tell them that turning into a Martian was a possibility?”

Finally, Min snaps. “No I didn’t. There was no way of knowing that was a possibility. This is why one uses a control group in the first place.”

“So you’re going to do this again?”

“I don’t know that what I intend to do concerns you at all, mayor. I brought you here so you could get a better grasp of what we’re dealing with now that the Unnatural and that AWOL Dark Matters agent are here. You’ll be dealing with quite a few complaints from other settlements that think they are better equipped to deal with the Unnatural, so it is best that you understand why he’s being kept here and how that is going to work.”

“He’s here because you want to use him. I got that the first time around.”

The door just about bursts off its hinges, then, as a burly man bursts through the door- Omar Khan. Roused from his bed as rudely as the Mick was, going by the fact that he’s still in a bathrobe over pjs. And, for some reason, wearing a baby-björn complete with a squirming baby.  
Omar himself is on the verge of either tears or going postal on everyone in Hoosegow.

For the baby’s benefit, his voice is low as he points at Min, Cecil and Cassandra in turn. “You two better have a damned good reason for getting me out of bed this late on a school night. And why aren’t you in your cell?”

“Family meeting. Uh, what’d you bring that for?”

Omar glances down at his baby. “First of all, she is not a ‘that’, she’s Arooj, and she did not want to bed down tonight. I had to bring her with me or she was going to scream everyone else awake.”

“How many does that make now, Omar?”

“Seven.”

Cecil whistles. 

“Hey, don’t you start criticising my wife and I for our family planning.”

Arooj waves at Mick. Mick waves back. Meanwhile, Omar Khan stalks to the Unnatural’s bedside and glances over him with disgust.  
“Damn. Earth makes them big. Big and nasty. He’s still under, huh?”

Mick’s mouth drops open. “Wait, wait, you knew they were drugging him?”

Omar straightens up, cupping one of his daughter’s kicking feet. “Of course I knew that! Do you think I’d come in here with my baby if I thought there was a chance he could so much open his eyes?”

“It’s inhumane-”

“He’s a mass murderer, Mayor Mercury. He killed fifteen people before his eighteenth birthday. He killed two of Dark Matters’ agents on The Platonium when they tried to apprehend him. He just killed M’tendere Beza last year. Is that the kind of man you want to stand up for?”

“Yeah.”

Omar blinks.

Mick can only shrug. “I’m sorry, but I can’t stand by this. You can tell me whatever you want about what he’s done and what he might do to us. I mean, if we were talking about a guy who was just a violent criminal through and through? If we were talking about a- a victimiser, about someone who, like, violates people or targets kids or whatever, then sure, I don’t give a shit, that person has already lost their humanity to me- but I don’t know about this man. I don’t know that I’m ok with drugging him until you Kanagawas decide to open negotiations.”

The police captain speaks through gritted teeth. “And why do you say that?”

“Well let me ask you, Captain Khan, why do you think it’s ok for the Kanagawas to take him? Why do you think it’s ok for a, well, frankly, for Hyperion City’s premier criminal family-”

Cassandra laughs. Cecil clutches his chest as if discovering a bullet wound. 

“-abduct an intergalactic criminal? I’m not saying that the Unnatural deserves to be roaming free. I just don’t think any of us have any business touching him. I think he should be on Saturn. In the justice system of a place he actually hurt. A place where he’s committed crimes that he needs to answer to.”

“He’s already here,” says Omar. “I’m working with what I got.”

“Ok, so let me help you out. Let me use my much more substantial, mayoral powers to move the Unnatural out of our way to the prison systems that have business with him.”

Min is unable to keep quiet for a moment longer. “Michael, if I may, I’m just curious as to what you think would happen if he was on Saturn? Or Jupiter? Do you really think their governments are so much better than ours? Don’t you think it would be easy to show the public a convincing execution, what, with modern technology being what it is, and then to take the real Unnatural and sell him along to a bidder? We certainly were not the only ones interested in acquiring him. There are much bigger fish out in the galactic pond, Mayor Mercury. Bigger fish with sharper teeth. Do you disagree?”

“I-”

“Do you disagree, Mayor Mercury?”

He swallows on a dry throat. “No.”

“Exactly. Because even you have some tangential awareness of the reality of our world. Now, imagine the disruption it would cause if we suddenly did decide to shuffle the Unnatural off to some ‘deserving’ party. Whomever you decide, however diplomatically you arrive at this conclusion, you are going to upset many others. Those others are not likely to take that upset lying down. They will protest. They will make their own unilateral moves to acquire him. Imagine if you told Jupiter that they could have the Unnatural. Well, the Saturnis wouldn’t take that lying down. They want their damn ring back, don’t they? So the next logical step would be for them to launch an attack against us, either while we’re transporting the Unnatural or before we have even reached an agreement with Jupiter. Mars is a small planet. We’ve no army, since the war. The best Hyperion City herself could offer up is the police force, and I’m not sure that the police could stand up against an attack from the likes of veteran mercenaries.”

“You’ve got your own militia.”

Min smiles. “Exactly. My own militia. Mine. I would use it to protect my assets. I am under no obligation to protect the rest of the city. So think about the trouble you would invite on Hyperion City. Think about how much of that trouble you and the rest of the place are really prepared to deal with. And then, when you have thought about it long and hard, come and tell me if you think the Unnatural is really the person who is most in danger of being harmed, here.”

Mick thinks for a minute. He stares down at his shoes, then at the Earthling who is so much smaller than he expected, then back at Min, whose eyes he meets steadily.

“Well, Mrs Kanagawa, it sounds like you’re pretty determined to do whatever the hell you want to. I guess I can’t get in your way. I can, however, put my foot down a little bit here.”

Before any of them can even register what Mick is doing, he has taken the mask off the Unnatural Disaster. Mick rips the tubing out of the machine and, knowing his back will make him pay for this later, seizes the whole machine from its cubby and carries it outside. He marches past the guards, past an inexplicable and surprised Sasha, to a fire-escape stair-case which, shouldering open, he tosses the machine down. It bounces on every step and smashes thunderously. The sound echoes about the floor, bouncing off the panopticon column. A few of the prisoners are stirring. The lights from guards’ torches are aimed at the spot, one or two finding Mick at the top of the staircase.

Sasha grabs him by the collar and pulls him back inside the fly-over, slamming the door. She opens her mouth to scold him, then shuts it, and looks into the room where the Kanagawas and Omar Khan are still watching Mick in a stunned silence. Except for the baby. She claps her chubby hands and makes a noise that must be a solicitation to do it again. 

“Anyway,” Mick gives them a thumbs-up. “I’m so glad we all got together to talk about this! Now, you guys go ahead and finish your plan. Sasha was just…”

He elbows her in the side. She elbows him back.

“Going to interrogate our agent, Glass.” Sasha admits.

“Right, that, and she needs my help to do it. You guys plot all you want. Catch me up on it later. Diamond, can you just stay here for now? In case the Unnatural starts to wake up.”

Mick marches off in the direction that Sasha was going. She has to run to catch up with his strides.

“You don’t know where we’re going.”

“Nope I don’t. Lead the way.”

She does. After a moment, she takes his hand and makes him slow down.

“I’m sorry, Mick.”

Mick pulls away from her. “For what?”

“I…I didn’t know they were going to call you in tonight. You weren’t supposed to be this involved.”

“I was supposed to just be a puppet, Sasha, I know. I don’t know why the Kanagawas think they need to show their puppet what strings are being pulled. Don’t apologise for that, though. I prefer knowing over not knowing.”

“I’m still sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just help me. I know they’re right, Sash, but I don’t have to like that they’re right.”

“What do you want to do, Mick? Let him go?”

“Fuck, Sasha, I don’t know. I just don’t want the Kanagawas to start making themselves a fucking, Andromeda’s A-Team of supervillains to do their stuff, you know?”

“We can talk about it after I finish up with Rex Glass, Ok? It shouldn’t take too long. I started on him a while ago, actually. Just letting him sweat it out a bit.”

“What did he do? Apart from run away.”

Sasha grimaces. “I can’t tell you. Sorry. I’m sure you’ll pick up on the context clues while we’re in there.”

The Unnatural has taken up so much space in Mick’s imagination that he has barely spared a thought for what Rex Glass might look like. Or who Rex Glass is? He knows that Juno worked with him, briefly, and that he apparently used Juno to steal a rare Martian death-mask out from under the Kanagawas’ nose. If it hadn’t been for the whole ‘using Juno’ part, then Mick would support that completely.  
He knows it was a headache for Sasha when he escaped. She was the one who put him on the case in the first place. Therefore, she is responsible for the loss of an asset of indeterminate archaeological and cultural value. Who knows where the death-mask is now? Damaged, no doubt, being used as the centrepiece for some eccentric exploitative billionaire’s collection. Maybe Rex Glass just kept it for himself. He definitely got away with some secret knowledge of Dark Matters’ internal structure and plans and stuff. 

Now that’s all very well and good, but Mick doesn’t know what a spy looks like. A criminal based around bombast and intimidation is easy. Speaks for itself. But what does a spy look like? If you can imagine what a spy looks like, can they be considered successful? And if this were the kind of guy who would seduce Juno, well, Juno has never let Mick see nor interact with any of his partners ever since they hit their twenties. Juno prefers keeping his romantic partners separate from his friends in the rare periods when he is seeing someone. The first, major relationship Juno ever had scarred him pretty bad. It makes sense that he’d want to take precautions so that future partners were easier to extract from his life if they turned septic. 

Sasha stops him outside of the door. “Ok, Mick. I’m letting you come in with me as long as you don’t get smart and argue with me, ok? No begging for this guy’s life. He’s a bad man.”

“Aren’t there only bad men in prison?”

She doesn’t smile.

Sasha goes in first, her hand hovering over the gun at her hip. “You’ve had a chance to sweat it out, now, Rex, so let me ask again. I want a real answer this time. What were you doing with the Unnatural- oh, shit.”

Rex Glass is still where she left him. Although, if Mick had to guess, he wasn’t stretched out on the floor, dead as a doornail when she left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh oh. Maybe Nureyev has secretly been a guinea pig all along. You separate him from his friend and he dies of loneliness?
> 
> So this chapter came out a bit later than usual because my workplace has re-opened (I’m in Australia, in a state that had comparatively few cases to begin with so I’m mostly good), but not my normal workplace which is like, thirty minutes from my house. I work in a corporate-run chain and they recently opened a new drive thru location which is about an hour from where I live, but owing to train schedules I have to leave two hours early or risk being, like, four minutes late, which would absolutely make my managers rip my head off and use it to serve salsa. It also takes me just under two hours to get back- again, train schedules! Thanks public transport- so I’ve now got a couple of days where I’m just spending four hours of my time reading and attempting not to make eye contact with the interesting characters that tend to populate public transport networks in my area. Hence, chapters might be a bit slower in coming out, but rest assured they are still coming!


	16. We may only look backward to ensure…to ensure we have not walked in the wrong direction. Wait, where am I?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: character experiencing chronic pain episode, disabled character being forcibly deprived of their aids, friends fighting, mentions/implied child neglect to do with food, mentions of torture, mentions of long-term abduction. 
> 
> So I'm reckoning on letting this fic just be the multichaptered beast it seems to want to be. Most of the folks in the comments said that they'd be alright with long-form fics, and pointed out that a longer chapter count might put someone off. I'm guessing that folks who don't want to, like, invest the week it will probably take to read this sprawling mess are probably going to be warned off by the word-count in the first place, so we're letting this one run long, y'all. At this point I'm betting on ten or so more chapters. Still lots to do! Lots of problems to solve, lots of friends to meet, lots of murders to commit and then cover up! It would probably suit the story structure best to just keep going under the one entry until we hit the end. 
> 
> Suggested listening: Laura Mvalu, 'Green Garden'
> 
> SPOILERS FOR THIS NEWEST EP OF JUNOVERSE BELOW
> 
> I mean dang I made Ruby7 an alien in the fic because I thought it would be cool, but it might actually be true in canon as well?

Juno has woken up in weird places before. The way he used to abuse alcohol, waking up in a place where he definitely had not been nor intended to go, that was just a part of the territory. Sometimes he’d come to in the sewers. Once he woke up on the wrong side of the seal enclosure at the Hyperion City Zoo, tucked into a hibernaculum that the pups had formed around him. It took three strong animal-handlers to pry him fully out of that one. Usually, though, he just woke up face-down in a room that he did not remember walking into, his head aching fit to split, his mouth dry and tasting of carpet and hang-over.  
Bad days. Slowly, though, there are good days piling on top of them. Smothering some of the bad he did and that was done to him. Not excusing it or replacing it. Just, softening. 

Like, waking up next to Nureyev is amazing every time it happens. Walking out into a ship full of people that love him and have ways of telling him this, whether it’s a full plate that Buddy puts in front of him silently, or Jet drawing out the chair beside him instead of saying good morning, or Vespa interpreting the psychosomatic importance of a dream he mentions. Even if Vespa’s interpretations tend to take nearly everything as a symbol of Juno’s impending doom.

Maybe Juno has gotten too complacent. Maybe he has enjoyed too much good in his life and the universe wants to remind him that he is, after all, Juno Steel, a human disaster and a blight on all who know him…no, shut up. Shut up, or I’ll tell Rita.  
Rita. Rita?

“Rita?” he manages. Oh, ouch, throat dry, throat full of needles.

“No.”

A shadow falls over him. A short shadow.

Soup is hanging over him with an odd greenish tint to her skin. Either it’s a trick of the light or Space-Hell turned her green. “Hey, Vespa, I think he’s got brain damage. He called me Rita.”

“I know who you are.” Juno wipes grit from his eyes. His movements are so sluggish it feels like his limbs are moving of their own will and informing him of what they did after the fact. 

“Prove it, amnesiac. What’s my name?”

“Soup. Are you ok? You’re not hurt?”

By way of answering, Soup sticks her foot in the air as if she means to kick Juno in the chin. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Where are we?”

“A swamp.”

The mattress beneath him does not feel like a mattress. Too thin. Juno manages to turn his head and sees that he is laying on a pallet made of a soft reed mat and a cotton blanket that look hand-woven, with Jet’s folded bomber jacket serving as his pillow. Oh, that does not bode well. Is Jet dead? Jet has got to be dead.  
Where the hell is he? Why are the walls a fleshy green? Are they somehow inside of Ruby? Has she transformed herself from a human to some kind of weird space-faring vessel? That must mean the Carte Blanche was destroyed in Space-Hell, which explains why Jet’s jacket is with him- salvaging their important personal items? 

Except, if Ruby has made herself a space-ship, then how come she added in a window, and how come that window is opening onto the most vibrant, ferny landscape Juno has ever laid eyes on? And this heat, this heat that lays on him like a second blanket and beads on his brow even though he hasn’t done a thing to exert himself, where is this heat coming from?

Juno is on the verge of a panic when Vespa appears beside the kid, working on a small wedge of that synthetic dip that turns her tongue blue. Vespa looks tired, but tired like she just had a long night- not tired, like, I have to tell Juno that all is lost and he, I and the kid are the only survivors. 

“Are we ok?” he ventures. 

“We’re ok.”

Good to hear. Now, onto the next pressing question: “Where are we?” 

“One thing at a time, Steel. First I’m gonna get you sitting up. Then, I’ll talk you through it.” Absently, she pats Soup on the head. “Why don’t you go outside, kid? See if Guapo wants to play.”

“You mean try to eat me?”

“He just licks to show affection. Go on.”

Soup gives Juno a lingering look of suspicion, which he meets with a smile as comforting as he can make it. Don’t worry, kid. I’ll be fine and I’ll be there when you need it. Go play with the vent-pug.  
And damn if she doesn’t relax a little bit and shuffle off to do is she as bid. Trust. Juno has got the kid’s trust. Of course. That is a complex mix of emotions, rising from his gut. That is a lot to think about and when he tries to wipe his eye before he can even start crying, he finds himself unable to move again.

“What happened?”

“A lot of things happened. One problem at a time. Here, drink this.”

Juno cannot raise his hands from the pallet and demonstrates this to Vespa, flopping his wrists uselessly. She sighs and holds the cup to help him drink. But it’s a weird thing she is offering him. The cup itself is strange, grooved and devoted and shiny in a way that suggests the clay was shaped by fingers instead of produced in an automated factory, which is weird. Juno has only ever seen handmade things behind the plexiglass of museum exhibits, not being used as every-day objects. And then there’s the drink itself- what the fuck is that? It looks like a robust green tea had a baby with asphalt.

“What is this?”

“Apparently it’s called ‘olala’, or monkey-weed. It’s like a medicinal coffee.”

“According to who?”

Vespa’s forehead creases. “Do you want me to be honest? You’re very out of it already, Juno, and explaining where I got this stuff from is gonna involve a pretty big paradigm shift that I’d prefer to ease you into. If I take a sip of it first will that make you feel better? I’ll make you hold my dip, though.”

“Nah. You’re the doctor here. Just- don’t laugh at me if I choke.”

The taste is weirdly spicy, kind of like a wild onion, but the after-taste is so sugary it makes Juno wrinkle his nose and shake his head like he has just done a shot. The effect comes almost immediately afterwards. Within half a minute, he can sit up and stretch his arms above his head, take a better look about him.

The greenness of the room was not a trick of the light; from the soft, seamless floor to the high ceilings, the building is green. Light glows through the walls from the sun-facing side, illuminating the place with a milky translucence that is broken up by sheafs of flowering creepers that hang and climb all over the place. The room itself is furnished with a sprawl of bookshelves, which are stuffed with actual paper books and scrolls, which, again, are foreign to Juno except as the battered artefacts in settlers’ museums. There are a couple of pieces of furniture made of a combination of hewn wood and white-ish stuff that’s got to be bone. If it weren’t for the jungle in the window, Juno would assume that he just woke up in the guest-room of an eccentric adventurer.  
Someone who still believes in things like Free-domes. Not that those don’t exist, but that they are the only solution to society’s myriad of problems. A strange sort of libertarian type who reads Ayn Rand and defends misinformed, ignorant political opinions with the sort of ferocity you usually see among kids who are being forced to share their crayons. 

The window is framed with a reed shutter, but apart from that it is open to the elements. As Juno stares in horror and wonder at the jungle beyond, a rotund bird with multi-coloured wings and the most incredible crest of feathers lands on the windowsill to preen. It regards Juno and Vespa with an incurious contempt. 

“This isn’t Haumea, is it? We’re on Earth.”

Vespa nods. “I didn’t believe it at first. I thought I was just out of my head. Further out of my head than I normally am. I thought, well, this is one of the strongest episodes of psychosis I’ve ever had, because it’s attacking me with tactile, auditory, visual and olfactory at the same time.”

“And you don’t get olfactory hallucinations.”

“Right? Our landing was a bit bumpy. I thought maybe I knocked my head without realising it, or that Ruby and Rita had steered us into a really weird pocket of Space-Hell, but that’s not what was going on.”

“What is going on?”

“We’re safe, Juno. We’re in a position to start working on getting the boys back, ok? So let’s get you up and go find the others.”

Somebody peeled Juno out of his jeans and turtle-neck before they put him to bed, even wrapped his hair in silk so he didn’t wake up with his dreads in disarray. That would have felt like an invasion of privacy say, when Juno was a fresh recruit and still had personal boundaries to maintain. But share one bathroom with six people for two years and those personal boundaries are going to corrode very quickly. It is a good feeling, Juno reflects, to wake up in a state of semi-undress and not have his first thought be that someone has taken advantage of him, or wants to see him distressed. His first thought is gratitude that his crew love him enough to not let the jungle steam his skin off by leaving him in denim and wool.  
Jet’s bomber is not the only piece of the crew’s personal property to make it into this weird plant-house. From a stack of clothes folded in the corner, Vespa produces a pair of Juno’s light, desert-weather pants and a t-shirt. Feels good to be back in his own clothes, now that he’s got the chance to appreciate it. 

As he pulls the shirt over his head, Vespa hands him a small object that resembles the kind of hearing aid that is tucked inside of the ear.

“What’s this?”

“Translator.” Vespa turns her head to show Juno her own. “I was suspicious at first…frankly, I still am, but I’d prefer the risk of putting something in my ear canal than not knowing what they’re saying.”

“What who’s saying?”

“Our hosts. The people who- well, I don’t want to say own this house, because I think the house owns itself, but you know. They’ve been very good about having a bunch of aliens crash-land in their back yard. Now I don’t want to say suspiciously good about it, but you know how my brain works.”

The last time Juno put a device in his head, it didn’t go too well. But he was alone, then, in his own head, and put himself in a spot where Rita couldn’t reach him nor help him until he was almost too far gone. He is safer now. He is more open by necessity. If this thing somehow does possess and change him the way the THEIA tried to, there are three incredibly capable women and a Martian who will snatch him right back.  
He pops the device into his ear.

“Do you understand me?” asks Vespa.

“Yeah.”

“It’s working, then, because I was speaking a Dysomniac creole.” 

Because it seems like a bad omen to leave it on the ground, Juno ties Jet’s jacket about his waist. It’s oversized on him and traps the heat around his legs, but Juno doesn’t care. As long as he can keep it close. 

Vespa leads him through a green hallway, down a green spiralling staircase with a banister of woody stems knotted together. They pass another window which gives Juno his first glimpse of the absolute chaos their arrival must have caused here. Out at the edge of the swamp Soup described, the Carte Blanche is over on her side, with a smaller, unfamiliar ship crushed beneath her. It is obvious from the ways the ships are laying that the Carte Blanche rolled a bit when she hit- rolled on top of and almost over the other ship, popped its cockpit, crushed its engine so hard that most of it shot out of the undercarriage and used what remained of the ship to gouge through to the subsoil for a few dozen metres.  
As far as crashes go, it’s not a bad one. Looks like most of the damage to the CB was done before it hit the dirt.

“I’m beginning to think we’re indestructible.” he says as he and Vespa come to the landing. “When it comes to crashes. Like, the guy upstairs hates us all so much that he’s prepared individually tailored, torturous deaths, and he keeps saving us so we can eventually get to those deaths. Do you ever think like that?”

“Nah. My paranoia has enough inspiration from mortals. I don’t want to think about omniscient beings who want to kill me too.”

Coming into an airy room that smells like a kitchen, Juno freezes in the doorway at what might be the strangest sight he has ever seen. There is a four-armed man working over the stove.

Well, are they arms? He’s moving them like arms. He lifts a pot-lid with one, but there is no hand at the end, and it is a greenish colour, unlike the rest of his skin, which is a light brown that would be totally mundane if it were not also shot through with veins of dark, deep green.  
Perhaps they are actual veins, but Juno is having a hard time tearing his focus from anything but the goddamn extra set of arms sticking casually out of this man’s spine. They remind him of the woody stems on the banister, of the tendrils of creeper, with a few spirals of ridge-marks that could be blunt thorns or buds on the verge of popping out. Juno guesses by the way that he moves that this man was born with these limbs, or at least, has had them for so long that he no longer remembers how to move without them.  
Apart from the incredibly distracting extra arms, this guy looks how Juno has come to expect Earthlings should look; fucking huge. Pushing eight and a half feet tall, with a body that’s proportionate to that height. There is none of that awkward lankiness you sometimes get with the taller spacers- he is lean, like a runner, and muscle-corded, like a day labourer, and wears his hair long. Not as long as Jet’s, but still, a lot longer than you would think of as manageable. 

_tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk_

Juno yelps and looks around for the animal that just made the noise. The shriek startles the man. 

He turns and looks in askance to Juno. “Are you alright?”

Juno yelps again. He points at the man to make sure that Vespa sees and hears what is happening.

“I know,” Vespa lowers his arm. “He sounds exactly like Peter. We’ve all already freaked out about it.”

Juno’s brain is still lagging behind. “You sound like my boyfriend!”

“I look a bit like him too, allegedly. He has-”

“The same nose! Oh my- that’s my boyfriend’s nose!”

“You must be Juno. How are you feeling?”

His eyes. Jesus. Those are not human eyes. They are the earthy purple of tubers and fruit, with a pupil that is almost as long as the eye iris is tall. The sharpness of his cheekbones and chin make the inhumanity all the more obvious to the point that it would chill Juno, if the man not were at the same time utterly unthreatening.  
Clearly, whatever Juno’s reaction may be, this is just a guy. This is just a guy in his kitchen going out of his way to be nice to a house-guest.

Come on! Get it together, Juno! “I- uh- humid! Humid? Confused? I’m confused. I’m confused and my mouth tastes like old sugar.”

Vespa pats him on the shoulder. “Juno, this is Arum.”

“Hi Arum.” he squeaks. “I like your plant. House. Plant-house.”

From all around him there is a groan, not unlike a tree bending in the wind. Then, because that is just the kind of day Juno is having, one of the creepers reaches from the wall and pats Juno on the shoulder. 

“Thank you. This is the Keep. They’re happy to have you here, I assure you. They get a bit sick of having only myself and my spouses to look at, I’m afraid.”

Another creeper swats Arum’s broad shoulder, as if offended that he suggested that. It dawns on Juno that the Keep is probably Arum’s parent, which opens up a line of questioning that Juno doesn’t even want to approach before he downs at least a quart of coffee. Too much is going on to absorb and he hasn’t even laid eyes on the rest of his crew yet.

Manners, Juno. “Spouses?”

“My husband and I are the only ones here at the moment. Our wife is away for work, which is a damn unfortunate thing as she’s the more accomplished doctor of the three of us. When your ship landed in our yard the other day, I was convinced we would bury at least one of you. But your captain was quite insistent on her survival.”

_tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk_

Ok, so that noise is definitely coming out of Arum, but from where? His mouth? His bones? 

Vespa nods along solemnly. “Buddy doesn’t like losing.”

“She hardly needed my help.”

“What exactly happened?” asks Juno, although he isn’t sure he wants/needs to know. 

“Essentially, I peeled the…demon-thing, off of her and held it while she beat it into the next life. Damien helped Vespa to subdue your pursuer, but I’m afraid they do not make for good prisoners to interrogate.”

“Sorry, you lost me. What demon-thing?”

Vespa rolls her eyes. “Buddy brought a friend from Space-Hell. We weren’t supposed to touch the things, but apparently- I don’t know. She’s alright. A little bruised, a little pissed off, but alright.”

“Your friends are out in the yard with Damien. In a few moments everyone will be coming in to talk over their options, but I think it would do you some good, Juno, to take in the air and get your bearings, if you don’t mind my saying.”

The implication behind this being, of course, that Juno is acting like a confused zombie and Arum hopes standing in the direct sun will help with that.  
Juno obeys.

Outside, the heat changes from pervasive to a physical force that threatens to bowl Juno over. The red sand deserts of Mars aren’t exactly conducive to a wet heat, and while this isn’t Juno’s first experience of humidity, this is so much more intense. He has only taken two steps out into the straggling ferns when he is beaded with sweat from head-to-toe. The wreck seems an impossible distance although it is only about 400 metres away, slumped on the shore of a swampy lake, the sand of which is sprinkled with glass from the incredible heat of their crash.  
Juno can see his crew, his family, gathered at the base of the wreck, and a little ways away from them Soup and Guapo gambol in a tall patch of reeds. In spite of Soup’s earlier complaints, she seems to be enjoying her playmate and waves to Juno as he passes her to join the others. Juno waves back, glad to see her smile. 

He tries to focus on that- on Soup, and on the others, because the jungle that presses in around them threatens to overwhelm him with its colours and sounds and smells. So many birds. So many flowers. So many shades of green and brown. The springy softness of the grass beneath his bare feet. It’s not even a bad type of overwhelming. Something about the green urgency of the world around him connects to the primal, pre-modern ape that hunches at the back of every human brain and saying ‘Hey, we’re home’.  
However, this is not an opportune moment to lay face-down in some grass no matter how bad he wants to. There will be time for that later. 

Buddy, Rita and another Earthling who must be Damien are standing around the garage of the Carte Blanche, the door of which has been ripped off its hinges and stabbed into the soil a few metres short of the tree-line. A large horned animal that looks like a buff cow grazes beside it, pausing every now and again to scratch its rump on one of the corners. From the way Rita is shouting into a gash just beside the garage door, Juno would guess that Ruby crawled into the ship to inspect the damage from the inside. 

Rita is the first to notice him and shrieks with excitement. “Mistah Steel! Yer up an’ attem! How do ya feel?”

“I was a little shaky at first. There’s, uh, a lot going on.” Juno gestures to the buff jungle-cow. “What is that, by the way?”

“That’s a water bison,” says Damien, who, mercifully, does not sound or look a bit like Nureyev. “Perfectly, utterly harmless, unless you happen to be a nutritious piece of vegetation. We share our space with quite a few of them. You must be Juno, yes?”

Juno braces himself so Rita’s hug doesn’t knock him down. “I must be. Thanks for putting us up and, uh, fishing us out of the flaming wreckage.”

Damien smiles. “Our pleasure. It was more of a smouldering wreckage, anyway.”

“What’s the damage? How are we doing?”

Yawning, Buddy points to the gash. “A wash, darling. An absolute ruin.”

“Not quite!” Ruby’s voice echoes from within. Wow, she’s deep in there. “But it would take four weeks to repair! And that would be in a fully-stocked garage with a lot of specific parts on hand. Down here, I don’t know. It could be two months or more. Depends on how much help the water bison are gonna be.”

“But all of us are ok?”

Vespa wraps an arm around her wife’s waist and pulls her in, kissing the top of Buddy’s head “Pretty much. Bud is a bit bruised. I rolled my ankle. Soup tripped this morning and banged her knee, but she’s forgotten all about it. Rita swears she’ll never get into a ship when Ruby drives again.”

“Darn tootin’ I won’t! I ain’t been that close ta death since the night ‘a my senior prom!”

“Look, I’m happy as hell that we’re all somehow alive- I told Vespa about my theory, so you can ask her- but can someone explain to me how we got here in the first place? Like, what happened to get us to this point?”

“I drove us!” yells Ruby from behind the auxiliary engine.

“To Earth? How?”

“I told you,” a crash that suggests she has just dislodged something important. “I know the routes. Jet isn’t the only one to use me to get through Space-Hell. Rita said go to Earth, so I went to Earth. Problem is, with those natural portals, you can never tell which part of the dang planet you’re gonna end up on. I’m just glad that we didn’t come out into an ocean.”

“Ok, Ruby drove us. Rita, why did you suggest Earth?”

She lets go of him, beginning to squirm and sweat from something other than the heat. “Uh…it seems far away, you know? Nobody ever comes here. People think of it like a backwater, the way us Martians think of Old-New-Town-” and then the effort of lying to them becomes too much. “I’m from here!”

Rita waits for the exclamations of shock and outrage. She pants, looking from face to face, even at Damien, who politely quiet in his confusion.

Juno is not surprised. Why should he be? Rita never indicated to him that she was from Mars and it would be stupid to assume, and besides, he always figured that she would bring up her ‘origin story’ on her own terms.  
He wants to tell her this. What comes out of his mouth instead is: “If you’re from Earth, why are you short?”

Buddy strikes her own forehead. “Juno, you cannot just ask people why they are short-”

But Rita seems to have taken his question as permission to keep talking. “I dunno! My whole family are the size you expect, you know? The size of Mistah Damien an’ his husband, but I just came out tiny! It’s like my friend, Franny, she’s a red-head in a whole family ‘a brunettes and fer a while they thought maybe one of her dads cheated, but they figured out that naw, it was just that they had a bit ‘a Irish in the family they didn’t know about- an’ I guess one ‘a my grandparents’ grandparents must’a been a Spacer an’ it only showed up in me! That ain’t why I left though- you know when yer a kid an’ ya think you know everythin’ and you gotta prove it to yer parents even though yer not really fightin’, yer just doin’ the normal amount ‘a chafin’ at the bit because you’re 19 and ya ain’t got yer drivers license yet? An’ then we got this huge family business, we got this, not monopoly, you know, because nobody does that on Earth no more, we got this inheirited position runnin’ some transports over on Turtle Island and Atzlan, an’ I felt like I could see my whole life planned out in front’a me because I’d never even talked about no other life with my parents-.”

At this point Vespa produces a plastic zipper-bag that would normally hold organs or sterile surgery tools, and passes it over to Rita to hyperventilate into. 

Juno pats Rita on the shoulder. “And what happened next? What’s this demon thing I keep hearing about?”

Buddy points to the tree-line where there is a patch of ripped grass and freshly turned dirt. “That would be the part of Space-Hell that followed me through. We buried it over there so Guapo wouldn’t gorge himself. I…couldn’t resist engaging a particularly provocative ghost, and as a result, I believe, something Abrahamic had a go at ripping my head off. Arum helped me dispatch him- I assume you’ve met Arum?”

“Couldn’t miss him.” says Juno, reflecting even as he says this what a stupid thing that was to say in front of Arum’s husband. “What was chasing us?”

“A fucking CameramanTM!” Vespa gestures back to the grave. “Can you believe that shit? I didn’t know they had high enough cognitive function to, fucking, open doors, let alone pilot a damn ship and execute the kind of complicated manoeuvres you need to fire a grappling hook in flight and hit what you were aiming for. It seems like such a waste of intelligence and life.”

“I feel obliged to remind you that it was attempting to behead you when I arrived.” says Damien.

“Still. I mean, you get born into this shitty job, your dad is a shitty person who sells you or lends you out to his criminal buddies, and then some skinny butch with anger issues ties you to a tree and you’ve got no choice but to blow up to avoid interrogation.”

“Wait, I thought that Noorssen wanted to talk to us. Why would he have his, uh, his freelancer try to kill you?”

“Obviously he only wants Buddy. Or maybe he only wants Bud and you and Rita. Who knows? I’d kill me, if I were going to try to bring our crew in. I’m a wild-card with a lot of issues.”

Buddy squeezes her shoulder. “And we love you for it. Does that about bring you up to speed?”

“I think so. I’ve only been out for like, a day, right?”

“We arrived yesterday evening, and it is the noon of the next day. If you take into account the time you spent in the morgue drawer then technically you were asleep for over a day.”

Juno is relieved. A part of him was worried he might have slept for days on end, and awoken too late to do anything to help Nureyev and Jet. The jacket knotted around his waist is heavier than it has any right to be. His stomach churns as he sees that Buddy has still got the damned ulu on her belt. He could have done so much with that. She killed a demon with it. Juno forgot that he was carrying it at all. 

Only now does it occur to him, looking at his knife, to ask what should have been the most obvious question. “Where’s the Martian?”

“Fine too, darling. Quite unconscious.”

“Now that, I admit, that was strange.” says Damien. “I thought that your ship’s cat over there would be the strangest animal I would ever see in all my born days, and not ten minutes later that notion is quashed by a true alien. An ancient Martian! Two of them at that!”

“Where are they?”

Vespa frowns. “I couldn’t think of anything else to do but put ‘em back in the briefcase. I hosed it within an inch of its life, so it was plenty clean. I put a couple of blankets in there too so it wouldn’t be so damn austere. Ruby says all they need now is time to recover.”

“And that- watching that was truly strange. She just sort of, scraped and nudged this mass of green, tormented flesh off of the slab into a briefcase, and in it was poured, like taffy, like tormented taffy.”

It is another half hour before Arum calls them in for dinner. In this hour, Juno establishes a few important things.  
Firstly, Rita may have finally met her match when it comes to chatterboxes. Damien talks like a shark swims; if he stops, he will keel over dead. He talks like the reciter of a national epic, like he has had professional training but has forgotten how to turn it off. As if at any moment, he expects to turn around and find himself giving a soliloquy to an enraptured theatre. 

Secondly, the Carte Blanche is stuffed. He helps Ruby wriggle out of the gash to inspect a few other parts of the ship and follows her indoors once, where almost nothing is disturbed. When the ship was hit, it didn’t do a lick of damage to the internal gravity regulators, so Juno has the disorientating experience of lowering himself sideways into the ship via the front-entrance, then having to lay down on the floor before he can stand up.  
The outside of the ship, on the other hand, is the furthest thing from space-worthy. The Carte Blanche has changed from a space-ship to a half-convertible. To get off of Earth with any semblance of speed, they’re going to need another ship. 

This is what Juno is stuck on when Buddy finds him. Trying to muster his pathetic, ignorant knowledge of Earth and determine where they might have to go to get things back on track, and marvelling at how little he truly knows of the place where all human life began.  
She has found him tucked away on the far-side of the ship, sitting on a ledge of ripped metal and contemplating the surface of the swamp. Whatever mess the Carte Blanche made on the way in has already been cleaned up. Water-birds bathe and hunt and squawk at each other. Swamp water has filled up part of the gouge on the beach, and a water-bison has settled into a doze in this muddy wallow. 

“There’s something you should know.”

Juno shifts over to make room for Buddy on the ledge. “About what?”

She frowns and hands him a piece of paper, dog-eared from being folded and unfolded many times. “Something Peter left us. You know how he is, with his notes and such. When La Charladora came aboard he was obliged to hide in the vents. We found this a few hours after we landed.”

There, in Nureyev’s loopy hand-writing, is the surrender of his most jealously guarded secret. 

‘If I can’t make it back with J & Je, look into Angel + Brahma, Magdelenius Ransom and his hench-son. Hope to be back soon. Xoxo- P. Nureyev’ 

Buddy lets him read it a few times before she asks the obvious. “Nureyev is his name, isn’t it? I hear you slip up every now and again. You almost call him something else.”

Juno lets out a long, shaky breath and leans on Buddy’s shoulder. 

“You don’t have to tell us anything, darling. Either way he has left us plenty to go off of.”

Juno passes the note back to her. “Everyone read it?”

“Yes.”

“Has Rita started looking into it?”

“Not yet, no. We’ve been a bit preoccupied with the ship and the new environment. I suspect she also wants to ask your blessing before she does.”

“Ok.”

“Juno, does this mean anything to you? About Brahma I mean. Is that a code, or…?”

He shakes his head. “No. No, it’s not a code. It’s an…admission of guilt, I think.”

“Could it help us spring him and Jet from Hoosegow, do you think?”

Juno smiles. “Nah, it’s nothing like that. He’s just…he’s just saying goodbye, I think, in case he can’t come back. Or he’s saying hello.”

He does not have long to dwell on it. A moment later, Arum’s voice drifts across the grasses, calling them in for dinner. 

(Hoosegow, two weeks later)

“Rex.”

Sasha is frozen in the doorway.

“Rex, get up.”

Mick tries to get into the room, past her, but she won’t let him. “What’s wrong with him? What did you do?”

“I didn’t do- he’s got a kidney disease, but we were treating it!”

“Help him!”

Still, she doesn’t move until Mick gives a good shove in the back. That brings her to her senses. Sasha crosses the small room and takes Rex’s limp wrist, checking his pulse. 

And that’s when Rex Glass comes back to life. 

Faster than Mick can gasp, Rex has kicked a leg up, hooking Sasha’s neck with his foot, and drives her into the ground. The wind is knocked out of her. She tries to push herself upright, but Rex has already seized an arm and twisted it behind her back. He settles on top of her, a knee between her shoulder blades, and pulls back until the joint actually creaks in protest. 

“Alright,” he blows some hair from his face irritably. “You know what I want to know. Spill it so you can get up and I can go back to bed.”

Mick starts forward. He thinks about pulling Rex off of her- Rex is skinny, he could probably do it. Then he thinks about how fast the man put Sasha face-first into the ground and stays where he is. 

Rex is not even looking at him. He heard his voice- he knows Mick is here. Mick is just not useful to him.

“I don’t know what you want!” Sasha hisses. Her face reddens, a vein standing out near her forehead.

“Where. Is. He.”

“Who!” Sasha yells into the tile.

“Who? Who the fuck do you think? Where is the Unnatural?”

“I don’t know!” 

Rex growls- actually growls, like an urban coyote, and twists her arm an impossible inch further. Sasha lets out a strangled yell and pounds her free-hand into the tile. She tries to push herself up on it- like, a one-armed push up to roll him off, but he twists the arm so far back that it really is in danger of breaking if she so much as twitches again.

“Mick! Get someone!” half an order, half a plea. 

Rex stares at Mick. His eyes are dark with suspicion and a second thing that might be sadness. It occurs to Mick, belatedly, that the reason Rex Glass and the Unnatural came in at the same time is not because they were simply caught together. The Unnatural was on the verge of death. If Rex can go from playing dead to immobilising Sasha in two seconds, then he could have gotten away from The Platonium too.  
Except, he would have had to go alone.

“Jet is alright.”

Rex’s relief is so powerful that it brings tears to his eyes, even as he is deciding whether or not to believe Mick. 

That just makes Mick want to convince him further. “I promise, he’s alright. They saved his arm and gave him a graft. They’ve got him on non-opioids so his sobriety is intact. They even braided his hair to keep it out of the way of the machines.”

Mick licks his lips. How much should he tell this man? How much is it going to take to get him off Sasha? And, really, what would it cost Mick to just unblock the way and let Rex go to his friend? Lord knows the Unnatural needs some protection from the vultures at his sickbed. But Captain Khan brought his kid…

“But…but he’s out. They put him in a medical coma. Min Kanagawa just told me that she wants to recruit him-”

Just like that, Rex stands up. Sasha rolls away from him and labours to her feet, then seizes him by the collar of his shirt.

“You fucking- I should beat you.”

Rex is looking past her. “Has he been under this entire time?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Mick, for fuck’s sake, don’t tell him anything else!” Sasha pushes Rex’s back against the wall. “And you, you think you’re the one who gets to ask questions here? You think you get to grind my face into the floor? Remember where you are and why you’re here.”

Rex doesn’t respond. His face whitens with what appears to be the effort of holding in a scream, which makes Sasha relent, backing up. It is all Rex can do to sag into his chair. He doubles up around his middle, his forehead pressed to his knees.

Mick doesn’t let himself think about the consequences. He just goes over to Rex and kneels in front of him.  
“What’s wrong?”

The reply comes out through gritted teeth. “I have chronic pain that can be triggered by fast movement. Do the math for yourself.”

“Sasha, get him something for the pain.”

Sasha crosses her arms. “I think you’re worrying about the wrong person here.”

“No I don’t think I am.”

“She has what I need.”

Mick looks back to Rex. “What?”

“She has what I use to keep it in check. My ear cuffs.”

His blood runs cold. Then hot. Mick thinks about hitting Sasha in the mouth. He thinks about it very hard, and then dismisses it, putting out his hand instead.  
Sasha doesn’t meet his eyes as she drops a pair of gold cuffs in his hand. Nor does she watch him put them on Rex. She doesn’t look back until Rex is able to straighten up on his own.

By which point she has no choice but to look at Mick because he is right up in her face.

“Wanna tell me why you took those away from him?”

“He wasn’t cooperating with the interrogation. He hasn’t given me a single answer for two weeks.”

“So you thought that if you took away his pain management and let him stew for an hour, you might be able to get something out of him when you came back?”

Sasha narrows her eyes. “You don’t get to judge me for how I do my job, Mick. You’re not my boss. You’re not my moral superior.”

Mick’s voice breaks. “Who are you? Jesus Christ, Sasha, where did you go?”

“You’re upset for the wrong guy. Don’t get hysterical-”

“Why not? I don’t know you. I’m looking at you and you look like Sasha, and sound like her but I don’t know who you are. I didn’t grow up with a person who’d take medicine away from a sick person.”

“Mick, come on. I…” she trails off.

“Go on, Sash. Tell me what you were going to say to make what you just did better. Tell me how you were going to make it ok.”

At this point, Rex not only clears his throat, but peels Mick and Sasha out of each other’s faces with a hand on each of their shoulders. Some of the colour has come back to his face. Still, he does not look good. He looks like he is only a few bad days away from needing a spot in the Unnatural’s hospital room.

Sasha swats his hand away. He pays her no mind.

“I’m sure this is a confrontation which has been brewing for a while, but frankly, I would appreciate it if you could save it for a later date. I am in incredible pain and I would like to be left the fuck alone so as not to exacerbate my pain any further. So, Agent Wire, if you could just do whatever it is you need to do to me to make it feel as though you have had a productive day, let’s get on with it.”

To her credit, Sasha doesn’t argue with him. “How did you get to The Platonium? And how the fuck did you and the Unnatural know to go for the Martians under the Wellness Centre?”

Rex considers this question the way you think about swatting a wasp that’s on the table. Weighing the probability that he will be stung if he misses, or the whether it’s worth it to leave a window open and hope the bastard lets itself out.  
“Excellent questions. I can answer none of them.”

Mick is sure that Sasha would be hitting the traitor if Mick weren’t there to watch her.

“Why? There’s no honour among thieves.”

“Indeed there is not. But I am not only a thief, Agent Wire, as you already know. Would that I were. Life would be easier.”

“Straight answers.”

Rex’s mouth twists in a wry smile. “Very well. I cannot answer your questions because I do not know how the Martian was discovered. Nor am I entirely certain of how The Platonium was infiltrated because I was not the one who arranged it. I was busy elsewhere.”

“So you’re telling me that you and the Unnatural are part of a bigger crew?”

“Not a crew.”

“Then what, a band? A council? A fucking drum circle?”

“A family, Sasha. A crime family, although I admit we seem to be forgetting to apply the context of ‘crime’ more and more often.”

Sasha puts her face in her hands. “Shit. Why didn’t you just lead with that, Glass? Why didn’t you just come out with that two weeks ago when we had to start this nonsense?”

“Because until now I did not know whether or not Jet was alive. Forgive me if I was not eager to help your investigation along.”

“Wipe that smile off your face.”

“No,” Rex’s grin widens. “You’re afraid now, aren’t you? You’re just now realising the scope of your error in letting us be captured. Think about whom the Unnatural associates with the most. Think about whom he would trust to place him in an enclosed system as an infiltrator. If you haven’t connected the dots already, I’ll be happy to do it for you.”

“Alright. Alright. If Buddy Aurinko decides she wants to lay siege on Hoosegow when the Kanagawas are paying the most attention they’ve ever paid to it, then that’s her mistake to make.”

“You sound a little rattled.”

Sasha laughs back at him. “Do I? If I lost my shit every time some brat threatened to get his big sister to beat me up, do you think I’d get this far in my career? Come on, Rex. You know me better than that.”

But that doesn’t wipe the smile off Rex’s face. If anything, it just makes him more smug. 

(Earth, two weeks ago)

Juno has travelled half-way across the universe and crash-landed in the enchanted, alien landscape of his ancestors’ cradle and, naturally, expected to be eating something a bit less familiar for dinner than plain ol’ arroz con pollo.  
Being that it’s a big dish that’s filling and relatively cheap to make, ACP was a staple in the Old-Towner diet. Juno grew up eating it at least twice a week. It was the first thing he and Benten ever learned to cook without burning at least half of it, and kept them sated during Sarah’s worst days, when she couldn’t even get out of bed to feed her kids. Luckily for said kids those bad days weren’t a regular occurrence until they were about twelve years old and could reach the stove-top without scorching themselves. 

The spices and the smells are different. The colours are different. The taste, though, is almost the same.

“Not to your tastes?” ventures Arum after Juno has been dissociating into his bowl for about a minute.

“No! I mean, yes, I like arroz con pollo, I’m just surprised to see it here. We cooked it all the time at home.”

“Well, it’s not exactly the typical dish of the Thai, but nor am I a Thai. I’m actually from Turtle Island.”

‘Thai’ like ‘pad thai’. What does that mean? Did a country get named after pad thai because it’s such an amazing dish, or is it the other way around? Juno looks at Rita, his confusion as clear as words written on his face, and mouths ‘it’s a country’.

“An island a little ways off of the mainland,” Arum continues. “A place called Puerto Rico or Borikén. The Keep was first seeded there, too, but we moved after we met the people of the Citadel.”

He just keeps saying words like Juno understands them.

“The Citadel?” repeats Ruby. This is only her second time eating in a human body and she’s having a huge amount of fun with it, spreading rice grains and beans on the floor where Guapo studiously laps them up. 

“That’s where I’m from. It’s the bigger city in the jungle,” says Damien, putting a generous portion of seconds on Soup’s plate. “Where our wife Rilla and I are from.”

“Is she dead?” asks Soup around a giant piece of chicken.

“Soup!” Juno reproaches. “Wait for people to volunteer that kind of information, ok? And try not to talk with your mouth full.”

“What did she say?” Damien turns to Arum, who repeats it in sign. “Oh heavens! No, no, not at all! Rilla is perfectly fine! She just went up to Turtle Island for a doctor’s conference. She is a doctor, you see, a real savant at it too, and one of her specialities happens to be the making of prosthetic limbs!”

“What’s a prospectus?”

“Good word, but not the one you were aiming for, I think.” Buddy reaches over Soup’s head to pass Vespa a bowl of salt-flakes. “A prosthetic is something you can put on when you lose a part of your body or were born without it. I’m wearing one right now as my other eye.”

“How am I supposed to tell? You always got your hair over it.”

“Yes, I suppose I do. Almost as if I don’t like showing that side of my face. How funny that is.”

Soup demolishes her plate in less than a minute and pushes it towards Damien for thirds, burping politely into her elbow as she does so. 

For about ten minutes, they just eat and talk about the Carte Blanche, what is wrong with it, what will need to be done to fix that, how the floor may now permanently be changed to seamless marble with a carpet of fingernail clippings over it, how the instruments are fritzed because of Space-Hell…Juno isn’t really listening. He is just trying not to cry into his bowl because the dish tastes like home, and Juno kind of misses Mars right now. He wishes he were with Mick and Sasha. He wishes they were together, laughing about the way people keep insisting that Mick is the mayor now.  
He wishes Benten were here to eat with them.

“So, darlings, I hate to bring the mood down, but as we’re all on our seconds I suppose now is as good a time as any.”

Knitting her hands together, Buddy leans on the table, her face grave. It is as if she threw a blanket of silence over the table and takes a moment for the crew to recover their voices. Damien parks himself on his husband’s lap either to let them have their solemnity or resist it a bit. 

“I think I know what we’re up against.” Buddy lays a hand on Vespa’s leg. “Now, Vespa, I would ask you to resist the urge to check me for a concussion. Bear in mind that I put these pieces together while blood was raining from my ceiling and my dead siblings were yelling in either ear, but let me bounce this off of you and tell me if I’ve made any sense. I believe the cure-mother prime is derived directly from the Martian’s bodily fluid- Vespa, dear, my love, I see you opening your mouth to protest, but you really must let me finish my theory before you accuse me of having a stroke. Look, they were hacked at, but they didn’t seem to be missing any of their limbs, did they?”

“Well, no.” Vespa concedes.

“May I then hypothesise that those wounds were created for the purpose of drawing large amounts of the Martian’s blood? Ruby, would that be possible?”

“Drawing our blood? Yeah, but I wouldn’t call it blood. It’s more like an all-purpose bodily fluid. I guess what we- what my galaxy- has functions like blood, but I can’t speak for them. We’ve had so much distance between us for so long that we’re almost different species, you know?”

“It was green,” offers Juno. “The liquid, I mean. And you have green veins.”

Arum laughs. “As do I. I wonder if I’m a Martian too.”

Soup’s head snaps towards him, her eyes bright with suspicion. “Are you?”

“Not that I know of. I was born of the Keep.”

“Your mom is a plant?”

“In the same way that an apple tree is an apple’s mom, but let’s not get off-topic.”

“Juno described the satelliters turning into Martians. Or, as much as they could, I suppose. You guessed what they were from seeing our friend in the briefcase, yes?”

Would it be too much in one day to explain how he once saw a Martian? Not only saw it, but was abducted and held as a hostage? God he wishes Nureyev were here.

“Yeah. Kinda.”  
There. Not a complete lie. He’ll tell them later on, for sure.

“And Ruby, you described it as regenerative? So how far from the realm of possibility is it that a continued diet of excessive doses of the cure-all might cure one’s human body so much that it attempts to become a Martian body?”

Rita, who has so far been too busy eating to talk, startles at that suggestion. “Whoa! That kinda stuff ain’t possible, is it? Like not in real life. Ruby, is it?”

“I dunno. I’ve never had a human drink my blood before.”

“But if it is the cure-mother prime,” continues Buddy “That means we have not only discovered its source is a living, sapient being who has already survived some incredible torment, but we may have access to the only source of it in our galaxy. If one needs blood then one needs a body which is still capable of producing it, yes? Not like the dead Martians that were in the lab with them. So it follows that those poor folks must have been bled to death to satisfy all the testing that had to have come before the control group, or died of the stress. I believe we caught our Martian on the verge of their own death. Of course, we won’t know for sure until they wake up and speak with us. But…”

“But if this is where the cure-mother prime comes from.” says Vespa.

“Somebody alive an’ in pain.” says Rita.

“Then we probably have to abandon any idea of using it, huh?” finishes Juno.

After that, dinner is a much quieter affair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nureyev is fine. He was fine, you guys. He was just taking a little nap on the floor. 
> 
> Not only did I make the weird choice of changing Arum from a lizard dude to something vaguely like a tree nymph so I wouldn’t have to inject monsters into an already crowded concept, but I looked at Arum and diagnosed him with Latine because, hey, it’s fanfic, if I wanna cope with my homesickness by making Arum a Puerto Rican then no one can stop me!  
> Also, the Second Citadel has always been set somewhere that’s coded as a mixture of Asian countries and cultures, Eastern and Southern, but I picked Thailand from all of the options largely because I thought it would be funny to have water bison milling about in the background.


	17. A long detour to the North Slope

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jesus Christ I did not expect this chapter to reflect what’s going on in the real world. When I made my notes for this chapter, things hadn’t yet begun to approach what we’re seeing now, on the surface anyway. Can't say I'm the happiest with this chapter, but things in the outside world have complicated my life a bit. I'm sure I don't have to tell you all and there's a lot of compilations of resources on how to help, floating around twitter and other platforms. At times like these, fanfic tends to be a place for escape and affirmation, so let's focus on doing that within this space and do our activism out in the real world. That being said, everybody, stay safe and amplify Black voices.
> 
> Trigger warnings: strong language, mention of guns/rifles (not their use), mentions of abduction and hostage taking, implication of past invasions by paramilitary force, conflict between private citizens and paramilitary force (no fighting), extreme cold, alienation from family, loss of parents, alienation from friends. 
> 
> Suggested listening: 'I'll fly away', by Alison Krauss

(Utqiagvik, about eight years ago)

The Spacers land at night, thinking that will give them cover. It doesn’t because plenty of people are still up- least of all the dogs, who raise a chorus that alert the whole of Utqiagvik to the invaders within ten minutes of their landing. Although the interplanetary/intercontinental ship port doesn’t get much traffic these days because of the over-land trains and the advancement in teleportation technology, Utqiagvik is still very much prepared to process ships, and remembers what they sound like. Those who live nearest to the port down by the lower half of Isatkoak Lagoon hear the engines trying to be silent. The hum bounces all over the snow. Quickly, they also discover that the ship is sending out a frequency that jams the comms, so analogue radios, CB’s and scanners are turned on to see if anybody knows who the hell just landed and gummed up the bandwidth.

Ironically enough, it is Mrs Kateri Sikuliaq who blows Dark Matters’ cover. She gets out the telescope that she’d normally have turned on the moon to spy on the lunar station, aims it at the dark airfield and announces to the whole city that it’s an unmarked ship, which means Dark Matters.  
Everyone knows that Dark Matters used to accompany the crude barons and whaling companies in those last, desperate days of their expulsion. They brought the weapons and the militias. They were the last to go when Utqiagvik and the small nation of others who’d come as support finally shook them off, and thus left a strong impression in the history of Utqiagvik’s liberation. Such a strong impression that Kateri, four generations after her home took out the trash, realises at first glance who these invaders must be, even with their dim lights and earnest attempts at camouflage. 

“Frey!” she shouts down to her husband, who is manning their CB in his bathrobe. “Frey, tell them it’s those Spacer people. Dunk Matters or whatever they were called.”

A few blocks down, their daughter Emanoraq has just finished strapping herself into the padded yellow jacket that marks her out as an active member of Citizens’ Self-Defence force. She was already up with her six-year-old, who couldn’t or wouldn’t sleep. Emanoraq was too busy going over the documentation of a trial to fight it out with her kid, so she let Yuka put on an ‘Andromeda’ movie and kept working. The trial was a really a mediated dispute between two siblings, allegedly over a snowmobile, but really everyone knows that this is just an extended family therapy session that the rest of the town is obliged to watch because they chose to do it in court.  
The tribal elders are content to let it go on for another week at least because having one or two disputes roll through the courts keeps them fresh. There isn’t much in the way of serious conflict up in Utqiagvik, nor across Earth. Once everybody recognised that the majority of interpersonal and societal problems were the result of capitalism, extremism or ignorance, over-threw the systems that privileged those, they found themselves getting along a lot better. 

Utqiagvik’s last murder was so long ago that Emanoraq was too young to hold her head up by herself. Domestic abuse was largely erased before her parents met and violent assaults usually come from interactions with the few Spacers that bounce between the lunar stations and the terrestrial station, who get dealt with quicker than they can realise they’re in trouble.  
Really, the most trouble Utqiagvik ever has is during the month that Igaluk shuffles entirely off the horizon, when everybody loses their fucking minds from the constant darkness. Folks will build bonfires in the middle of the street, practice primal scream therapy into the vents of their apartment blocks, accuse each other of spying (which is true but only called out during the dark month), get paranoid from watching horror movies or too much weed, or accidentally shoot each other while trying to hunt in the dark. 

This is what Emanoraq was thinking about while she pored over the transcripts. She’d tuned out the sound of Andromeda monologuing at the villain of her movie and with it the ambient noise of the room, so she didn’t hear that the radio was on until Yuka padded over with it in her hand.

“Grandmomma says to put your duds on,” she said. “The space people are back and they got guns.”

“Ok,” said Emanoraq, shutting her folder. “Go wake Daddy up.”

While Emanoraq dressed, she could hear Yuka crawling onto the bed and thwapping her father in the face with a pillow, her husband’s groggy muttering and then, when he processed what Yuka said, the sound of wheelchair tyres laying down scorch marks on the floor. He roared out of the bedroom with Yuka slung indignantly over his shoulder and asked if he needed to get his bow and mount up for battle.

“No! Jesus and Mary, you’re so bloodthirsty when you wake up.” she says now, taking her hunting bow out of its locked case in the closet.  
Hopefully, they won’t have to go as far as checking out the anti-aircraft guns and other heavy weapons from the town armoury, but it pays to be prepared to fight if the Spacers decide they want to get violent. 

“I’m always bloodthirsty. And this isn’t bloodthirst! This is practicality!”

“No, this is definitely bloodthirst.”

“What are you saying?” Yuka doesn’t understand enough of her father’s Central Thai to follow the conversation, which is why that is the language they have picked for the argument. 

“Let me get a handle on the situation first, alright? Just because I’m already dressed and awake. If we’ve got an immediate fight on our hands, I promise, you’ll have plenty of time to participate.”

“Damn right I will!”

“For now, why don’t you two finish watching ‘Andromeda’? I’ll be back soon, and safe.”

As she kisses him goodbye and extracts a promise from Yuka to take care of her daddy, her observers knock on the door. Emanoraq is a long-standing member of the CSD and therefore not allowed to go out without at least two newer people accompanying her, who are fresh on their de-escalation and diversion training. No matter how good or moral of a person you appear to be, you don’t get to work unobserved in the CSD; at every step of the way there are folks who will hold Emanoraq accountable for what she does, and report back to an independent commission at the end of each mission. They swap them out every two weeks and don’t pair her up with the same people, if they can help it.

Tonight, Emanoraq is surprised to see an incredibly familiar face among the two that she sort-of knows. She gives her sister a hug made awkward by the girth of their clothes.

“You aren’t on duty, are you?” 

Arcady smiles from her eyes. “Nah, but I want to be with Momma and Dad until this blows over. Somebody’s gotta hold Momma back from giving those Spacers a piece of her mind and you know Dad’s just gonna egg her on.”

The lights are on, now. Flooding the streets and glinting off the handles of a few harpoon guns, a few crossbows and the pastor’s spear. Emanoraq calls to out to her over the crunch of crampons and the buzzing of voices.

“What are you gonna do with that, Pastor Nana?”

“Make a point, Emma, make a point!”

The light crowds part to admit the streams of CSD, the doctors and nurses who will act as medics if necessary, and the tribal elders. Emanoraq’s observers lead the way. The two Sikuliaq sisters follow, arm-in-arm, discussing what the hell Dark Matters thinks it is doing back here. 

“Do we still have oil?” asks Emanoraq.

Arcady, who is an environmental scientist, shrugs. “I mean, yeah, we do, we still have a lot, but I don’t know if Spacers still need crude oil. I don’t even know what you do with crude, ok? Ask me anything about permafrost and glacier migration and I can give you solid answers, but crude is a mystery to me. Besides, I thought the Spacers use solar energy.”

“When the news says everyone’s going ‘solar’, they’re talking about the government, you moron. The solar government is warring with those guys who live past Neptune or something.”

“They have a war on?”

“Yeah, Arcady, they do! Jesus. If it ain’t frozen you just don’t give a shit, huh?”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. You know Momma can smell it on your breath.”

The foot traffic is slowing, up ahead. People are standing still or shuffling onto the sidewalks like they are making way for a parade. A one man parade- a man doing his level best not to trip on the icy road and eat shit. 

“Has anyone got eyes on Emma Sikuliaq?”

Emanoraq throws her hand in the air and steps into the road. “I’m here!”

Her observers move to let her meet with the man running towards her, his breath steaming like a locomotive from the effort of doing so in snow-shoes. She catches him by the shoulders and helps him stay upright. 

“Got something for me, John?”

“Your parents were just taken out of their house.”

Emanoraq can’t process what John just said. “You mean they went to the port?”

“No. No, they were taken out. These guys in tactical gear with laser guns, they took them out of the house-”

“By Dark Matters?”

John nods, wiping the sweat from his face. “I heard them breaking the door down. I heard Kateri raising hell. I thought about trying to help, but-”

“But they would have just hurt you too. Ok. Ok.” Emanoraq takes a deep breath. “Thanks for telling me John.”

Beside her, one of the observers cups their hands to their mouth. “We need transport! CSD better start mounting up! Somebody got a snow-machine?”

“Here!” a snowmobile is thrust from a garage, and then another a little further up the street.

Emanoraq mounts the first and makes room for one of the observers to climb up after her. Arcady takes the second with her, and soon they are going down the streets just as fast as people can get out of their way.

The mood has changed. The jokes have stopped. Voices that were raised in laughter are now raised to pass the news on.

“Make way for the Sikuliaq women!”

“CSD better get down to the Sikuliaqs’!”

“Can we get the elders an escort after them?”

On the analogue bandwidths, the elders give permission to open the town armoury and arm the CSD, with strict instructions that no one slacks off on checking them in and out. Weapons are to be accounted for at all times. Everyone within two streets of the port are to be evacuated and housed by neighbours until the situation is resolved. Meanwhile, the barricades that are normally used to dissuade brazen wildlife from marching into town are brought out to block the roads, reinforced with vehicles and pallets that hold food at the indoor market and a few proper barricades, which are relics from the days when invasion was an urgent threat. Many with big dogs harness them up and join the barricade; no matter what kind of equipment these Spacers have, a huge barking animal is always going to be an effective deterrent.  
As the town armoury more than a mile away from the edge of town, a courier system is quickly set up to get the equipment moved down to where the confrontation will occur. People load the guns up on borrowed snowmobiles and follow the tracks left by the Sikuliaq sisters and the stream of CSD and elders moving after them.

By the time the first of the weapons and laser-proofed armour begin to get to the CSD, Emanoraq and Arcady have had a chance to look at their childhood home. The front door was broken open. Flurries of snow and slush cover the carpet. To add insult to injury, they cannot shut the door because it was crushed off of its hinges so they can’t even shut the snow out. A neighbour offers to seal up the hole with tarpaulin. Emanoraq barely hears him- barely feels herself being put into a vest by her sister, because she is too busy staring at the troughs in the snow where her parents were clearly dragged.  
Why did they have to be dragged? They would have walked. If Dark Matters had just knocked and demanded they come out, her father would have answered and walked away with them, cheerfully predicting the hell his captors were inviting with this abduction. 

Between the two troughs in the snow, a sleek device of glass and plastic has been set upright, like a tiny black cairn. Arcady stoops and picks it up the way she’d pick a rotting fish off the beach, quickly handing it off to her sister. 

“I think they want to talk to us.”

The group circles up around the device and Emanoraq, leaning in with recording devices and walkie-talkies so that they can broadcast the message to the rest of the town. One of the elders has stripped down to her gloves so she can translate what’s being said into sign for those that are hard-of-hearing.  
Arcady digs her mittens into her sister’s shoulders. She’s got such a grip that she is scraping Emanoraq’s skin through a few layers of animal-hide and Gore-Tex. 

Then, without so much as a blinking light to indicate the device is active, it speaks. “Am I speaking to Emanoraq Sikuliaq?” 

The question comes out in a clumsy Pan-Pidgin: the common spoken-language of Turtle Island, when folks don’t have translator buds with them. Sounds awkward and canned. Like the speaker is having their lines fed to them, or just recently started speaking Pan-Pidgin and isn’t sure where the inflections are supposed to be. 

“No,” Emanoraq manages. “You’re speaking to the township of Utqiagvik via its Citizens’ Self-Defence, our accountability volunteers and most of the tribal council of elders. We have you on speaker. What do you want?”

They falter for a moment. “I only need to talk to Sheriff Emanoraq. Let’s do this in private.”

“Sheriff?” repeats one of the elders. “We got a Sheriff now? News to me.”

Emanoraq is thrown for a loop. She looks to the tribal elders, mouthing ‘sheriff’?

“They think you’re in charge, baby.” says the elder Mary. “They think you’re the boss of all the CSD here.”

Emanoraq rankles. “We don’t have one of those.”

“I need to speak with you and whoever else is in charge, then.”

“You are.”

“In private.” they are growing impatient. 

“Private?” repeats the same elder, Misha, who is getting just as impatient. “You want private, you go to another town, friend. We don’t have ‘private’ up here when we make community decisions.”

“Then am I speaking to a body who is capable of making decisions on the behalf of Utqiagvik? I have demands that need to be satisfied-”

“Yes!” snaps Emanoraq. “Get out with it!”

“We only want your cooperation. Kateri and Frey Sikuliaq will be taken care of for the extent of their stay with us. In the meantime, you are not to approach the port, nor make any attacks on the port, nor attempt to spy on what we are doing at the port. In return we will not approach the limits of Utqiagvik again. We will not interfere with your citizens anymore. We will, however, continue to jam your comms-”

“You do realise that this is an act of invasion?” interrupts elder Panniguaq.

“With what Dark Matters did the last time they were here, I’d call it an act of war.” adds elder Mary. 

Shocked, the voice asks. “Who told you who we are?”

“We got eyes!” says elder Misha. 

“We have a simple demand. In the next three days, the Unnatural Disaster needs to make landfall at Utqiagvik and surrender himself to our custody. We have a confirmed sighting of him in Venusi space, so he has more than enough time to get here. Our demands are being broadcast as we speak. As soon as the Unnatural Disaster has surrendered himself your citizens will be returned, and we will leave. Is that understood?”

The circle takes a moment to absorb this. Static whispers up and down the street as the message is passed along.

“This is not an attack aimed at you-”

“If you think we’re going to believe that crock, you’re all brain-dead.” continues elder Misha, gesturing for a courier’s walkie-talkie. “This is Misha down at the barricade. You folks up at the radio tower, you go ahead and let Provideniya and Tuktoyaktuk know what our situation is. That Spacer company came back and abducted two of our people. Sounds like we’re under siege, too.”

“And if you want to negotiate terms, you’ll have to do it to our faces. You can have your bugged comms back.” Emanoraq finishes by lobbing the device over the barricade, where it shatters on the frozen road. 

In the end, though, they have little choice but to go along with it. Dark Matters has caught them by surprise and gained the upper-hand by acquiring hostages. They’ve got to have some almighty weapons stashed in that unmarked ship to have the nerve to return. Just as Utqiagvik remembers Dark Matters, the company must surely remember them and the ass-whooping Utqiagvik dished out. Inuit Nunangat and the continent as a whole; people are bonded and will throw down for each other’s safety and freedom at a moment’s notice.  
The fact that Dark Matters did not launch a direct attack on the town while most of them were asleep and unprepared demonstrates that Dark Matters is aware of their precarious situation. They are only safe so long as they have the human shield of hostages.  
By the morning of the first day of Dark Matters’ deadline, Frey and Kateri’s house has been converted into a make-shift base of operations. The CSD sets up there with the weapons at the ready, the elders housed in the front room where they can observe the goings-on at the port with Kateri’s star-gazing set up and plan from there. When Emanoraq tries to make herself a cup of coffee with shaking hands, she is almost body-slammed away from the machine by a neighbour who immediately takes over, feeding and watering everyone in the house from pantries all over the street. 

Since Emanoraq broke the comms, Dark Matters have to leave the safety of their port strong-hold to communicate. At dawn, a unit of ludicrously armoured Spacers come down on sleek machines, so advanced they somehow carry them across the ground without wheels to touch it. This is impressive and intimidating right up to the moment that one of them attempts to dismount. Their jackboots plant on the ice, slip and keep going until they are above the Spacer’s head. No doubt, the ringing laughter of their audience behind the barricade can be heard all the way to the port.  
After that, the Spacers stay on their bikes. One of them holds a device up to their visor that somehow amplifies their voice and re-states Dark Matters’ demands. 

A stepladder is brought out so a member of the CSD can peer over the barricade and reply, by way of a megaphone, that they know what Dark Matters want and think, unanimously, that they are idiots for believing the Unnatural will show up. When the Spacers begin to protest, a speaker is passed up, held to the megaphone, and blasts about half of a Sturgill Simpson song until the Spacers finally have had enough.  
At noon, just as the first handful of convoys have begun to teleport into the other side Utqiagvik, near the whale-bone arch where Dark Matters cannot easily see them, Emanoraq’s husband turns up with fresh clothes and a blanket for her. Wisely, he left Yuka with a creche of CSD and volunteers’ kids that has formed at the elementary school.

The mere sight of her husband prompts her to burst into tears. He commandeers the downstairs bathroom so she can have her cry in private.

“He won’t come,” she sobs into a handtowel. “He won’t come, and then what? What if they kill Momma and Daddy?”

Her husband strokes her back. “They won’t. Honey, even if Dark Matters can’t see them coming in the front, they know we have people arriving to help us. I saw a drone fly over as I was walking this way. Pastor Nana can throw spears like hell, by the way. She hit it right in the lens.”

“They don’t care! They don’t take us seriously, you know? All Spacers think us Earthlings are a bunch of backwards, superstitious cavemen. We’re not! We’re modern! We’re contemporary, goddammit! Just because we use analogue shit and pay respects to the spirits that very obviously exist in front of us- just, God! It makes me so fucking angry! These people who live so far away from us and from our way of life think they can pass judgement on us as ‘lesser’. They’ll kill them, Marc, just because they don’t think our lives are as important as theirs.”

Marc frowns. “We won’t let that happen. The world is watching right now, Emanoraq, and not just watching. People are coming to help. My sister and brother are both on their way, and Rilla is bringing both of her husbands. If I ask for it, a third of the Citadel’s soldiers will come. If that’s what we need to save your parents then I can make it happen, ok? But for now, let’s just take stock of what we’ve got and how we can use it for the best. Today, the people come. Tonight, we will plan. Does that sound ok?”

Emanoraq can only nod. 

“You really don’t think there’s any chance of Jet coming back?”

She laughs. “No. No way.”

“Not even a bit?”

“He knows Dark Matters won’t be able to make good on their threat. Not if they want to get out with their asses intact. Besides, he’s never done anything he didn’t want to do, and I guaran-goddamn-tee you he doesn’t want to come back here.”

By the second day Yuka, who has never gone a day in her life without seeing her grandparents, starts to ask where they are. She is perturbed by the amount of new faces in her town, too. She definitely knows that something is up, but being six and never having been exposed to weapons outside of the context of hunting, the conclusion she comes to is that they’re hosting some kind of hunting festival or convention. Emanoraq doesn’t disabuse her of this. It is all she can do to keep it together. In recognition of her being far too close to this situation, the elders have her step down as CSD for the time being. She can watch as closely as the rest of them but cannot participate.  
Marc, on the other hand, cannot be held back. The Spacers get what is obviously their first glimpse of a dragon, going by the screams and the swearing, trotting across the top of the barricade at regular intervals: Dampierre and Marc on patrol. The sight of Marc saddled up on Dampierre’s back, with his legs strapped to the dragon’s flanks so the dead weight won’t throw off his balance, flexing through his parka and insulting the Spacers so colourfully that even the language barrier doesn’t protect them, that probably confirms those stereotypes that worried Emanoraq. Earthlings being a bunch of crazy wizards and all.

Marc also provides an effective distraction to what is happening on the ice right now. On the second day, while Marc verbally eviscerates the Spacers from the barricade through the megaphone, a few of the more experienced folks from Utqiagvik and the other towns that have showed up to help walk out onto the sturdy sea-ice under a spell of invisibility. They manage to reach the edge of the port before running up against some kind of wall, just as invisible as them, but which ripples like the skin of a bubble where it is touched. Whether or not this barrier can be destroyed is impossible to tell because the Spacers notice, obviously, that their stronghold is being visited and start threatening to shoot. 

Back to the drawing board, then. The elders preside over a meeting that packs most everyone into the meeting-lodge, with the swollen population of visitors spilling out into the snow and those posted on the barricade listening by radio. There, it is decided that the safest option is to allow the three-day deadline to pass without further action. After Dark Matters realises they have been sent on a fools’ errand, whom is really laying siege against whom, then they will re-negotiate their terms. 

Emanoraq sleeps fitfully that night. She cannot get any at her parents’ house with its crowd and the pulse of tension in the air, so she swings by the creche, picks up Yuka and manages a few hours cuddled up to her daughter. 

Later, she will think of this as a mistake. It will mutate in her imagination into the reason that Dark Matters do what they do on the morning that follows. Somehow, they knew that the Sikuliaqs’ eldest daughter had abandoned her post. Her will finally faltered. Her resolve was tested and she failed. 

The first shot wakes Emanoraq up. Utqiagvik is a tundra town with buildings designed to hunker against the Arctic winds. Sound carries out here, especially when there is silence to begin with. 

The shot is remarkably loud for coming from a laser gun. Amplified, perhaps, to make it clear that Dark Matters have actually committed to what lurked at the end of Jet’s deadline. 

A keening that echoes after the shot, and then a second report, and then quiet. For a moment.  
Knowing there is now nothing she can do, Emanoraq simply turns onto her side and puts a pillow over her face.

Kateri Sikuliaq is buried on the grounds of the church in which she was baptised and married. Her headstone bears the emblem of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha of the Algonquin and Mohawk, for whom she was named. Jetffrey ‘Frey’ Sikuliaq is buried beside her, as he wished to be, in spite of the jokes that he’d be happy being tossed to into the sea for seal fodder when his time came. The enormous caribou-hide bedspread which covered their marriage bed for as long as their children can remember is cut in two so that each of them may be shrouded inside of their coffins.  
They go on either side of Yuka-James’ grave. His headstone looks grey and old between the fresh slabs of granite, although it doesn’t want for care. Arcady comes down each week to give it a good scrub and ease the weathering effects of the wind and the salt air. She took over for Jet after he ran away. 

Once again, the whales arrive to watch the funeral from beyond the rime of landfast ice. The sounds of their spouts and slapping tails carry over the flatness of the tundra and mingle with the mourners’ weeping. 

(Juno, now)

By the afternoon of his second (conscious) day on Earth, Juno can say with a certainty: jungle bad.

Thinking with any clarity of detail beyond that is too hard. There is some level of climate control within The Keep, but it is controlled to the tastes of the inhabitants; the Keep and Arum are like frogs in that they prefer to always be a little bit damp, and Damien has lived in the jungle his whole life so knows how to survive the heat. Therefore, the difference between the weather inside and outside is only apparent during the heavy rains that fall each night.  
Juno wakes up in the early hours of the morning because of furious debate among the various full-throated birds of the jungle and catches the man doing some kind of martial art on the yard. Though the sun has barely peeped over the horizon, it is already warming up. Juno was over-heated just by the action of going to the window to give those birds a piece of his mind, and there’s Damien, in boxers, kicking and flipping and eventually even brandishing a staff that’s either a weapon in its own right or a place-holder for a sword.  
It is impressive to watch. A bit nostalgic, too. 

Martian police officers all get some basic training in martial arts because a lot of Martian organised crime also teach their employees. The expectation is that each officer will improve on their training as they rise through the ranks, which means that Juno’s cut off long before he got close to the coveted black belt. On the bright side, being a private detective means that you pick things up on the way. Juno has an arsenal of moves Frankensteined from a few disciplines and vicious Martian street-fighting. The one time he let himself be persuaded to spar (against Jet, because he was sure that if he took Buddy up on the offer she would put him through a wall), he actually won because Jet wasn’t expecting so much scratching and biting. 

If it works, it works.

Damien has got a lot more grace going on for him. There is a joy, too, in his practice that tells Juno he must have done this for a long time. Professionally, at that. Like a solider. While Earth seems a lot safer than most of the galaxy, no one ever said that it was a utopia. 

And then the sun comes further up and Juno can no longer think critically. Sun bad. Humidity bad. Need ice. Need to lay down.

Still, he goes out with the rest of the crew to labour under the heat of the day. First they have got to peel Noorssen’s ship off of theirs, which would be impossible without Ruby. Ordinarily, they would have access to a host of things like scaffolding to reach the more difficult repairs, a crane to hoist the CB up so its weight is not working against them, welding and cutting tools and the like. What they have got is a swamp and the contents of the garage. They make do.  
Ruby is the hero of the day. By shedding her human form and expanding into what must be her ‘true’ form, Ruby is able to act as a substitute for the industrial crane they would have otherwise needed to separate the ships. And boy, does she sure fucking look like a Martian. It is a Martian for sure. Bigger than the one sleeping off their torture in the briefcase. An organic, healthy shape compared to the monstrosities that blobbed around The Platonium. A lot more robust and streamlined than the one Juno fought in a tomb, perhaps because she is much younger and stronger. She parts the metal like pieces of tissue paper. Juno barely survived his encounter with Miasma’s ‘true form’ and there is no way he would ever survive fighting Ruby, in her apparent prime of vigour and strength.

Good thing, then, that he is fairly sure it will never happen. If Ruby wanted to kill him then the time to do it would have been when he spilled boba on her seats.

Soup quickly discovers that Ruby’s flesh has got the springiness of a trampoline and that is her afternoon sorted. While Ruby’s tentacle appendages peel the ships apart and moves the bigger chunks of the mess into a pile, one of them is always occupied in preventing Soup from launching herself into the treetops. Soup doesn’t mind even when she is caught upside-down and held from the ankle, though Juno almost bursts a blood vessel in the effort to hold his tongue. They are fine. They are fine. Arum is some kind of wizard, so even if Soup does crack her head open or impale herself on a wandering water bison’s horn, she will be fine. 

Ruby also sets about digging a set of pits in which they’ll pile the stuff that needs getting rid of- wreckage that’s so destroyed there is no chance of reusing it, and the massive amount of fingernail clippings that somehow followed Buddy out of Space-Hell. They will have to empty the tanks and reserves anyway to transport it safely, so the fuel is put beside the pits with the intention of using it for a bonfire. 

After Ruby has created some space, Vespa crawls up into the gap and works on the grappling hook with a welding torch. The chain-links dribble down the body of the ships and coagulate in the grass, but the other ship refuses to come away. It cleaves stubbornly to the hull of the CB and obliges Ruby to peel it away like a piece of gum off the bottom of a desk. They decide within five minutes that every piece of that ship has got to be bristling with tracking devices- salvaging it to fix the CB would be a stupid idea.

“What are we gonna do with it then?” asks Vespa, now stripped to the waist. “We can’t just leave it here to pollute the swamp.”

Before Juno can suggest a bonfire, the solution presents itself in the form of a man screaming for his life. Baritone screams that startle the birds and sends Ruby scrambling to recover her human form, in case the murderer proves aggressive. But again, before a rescue mission can be mounted, the screamer emerges from the tree-line wearing Guapo like a shawl, protesting the wet tongue swiping his face with a lot of exclamations of “GADS!” and “WHAT IS THIS AFFECTIONATE CREATURE!”

A moment later, freed from Guapo and supplied with a translator, Angelo introduces himself quite casually to the unexpected house-guests. He kisses the hand of everyone who will let him and, when Vespa threatens to turn the welding iron on him, shakes hers. He is a big man, like the rest of the Earthlings. Where Damien and Arum have sprinters’ bodies, Angelo has the muscled curves of a wrestler and the arms of someone who spends at least thirty minutes every day doing push-ups.  
Fortunately for the Earthlings, Angelo is as friendly as his teddy-bear shape implies. 

The moment he has been caught up on the situation, he brims with advice. “Why not let the Citadel take it? We don’t care if it’s covered in trackers, so long as it can be put to some good. Whoever wants to come out of their way to start trouble with us for doing a bit of salvage is welcome! A good scrap keeps the troops fresh! Keeps the greenhorns on their toes! Now as to the other ship, she’s in quite a state. What do you plan to do with her?”

Buddy shrugs. “Get her to a port, I suppose, where she can be fixed.”

“Ah! Well that might be a bit difficult! Earthlings don’t use air-bourne transport very much anymore, on account of the dragons. Spooks them and messes with their migratory patterns, don’t you know?”

Rita nods. “Oh yeah. We never flew nothin’ bigger than a 20-seater passenger plane out in Manhattan. My granddaddy knew some bush-pilots up the Anishinaabe way an’ apparently one ‘a the big problems is when dragons try ta greet’cha like yer one of ‘em, which involves a lot ‘a head-buttin’…”

They just keep saying words.

While Rita and Angelo expound on the delicate social protocols of flying among dragons and Ruby starts to tear Noorssen’s ship into manageable pieces, Juno sneaks away, without meaning to sneak, and takes his comms out of his pocket. Amazingly, he is still getting reception. This hasn’t helped him, however, because Mick is not picking up.  
It is not that Juno thinks Mick can help him in any practical way. In fact, he knows the moment Mick picks up the phone and asks what the heck Juno thinks he is doing, he will just blubber that he doesn’t know. Everything was going according to plan until the PTA parents dragged him into a torture dungeon and started turning into Martians. He wants to talk to Mick for a number of reasons, not least of all is to ask him why people keep referring to him as the mayor.

Even the news streams are doing it. Juno borrowed the surprisingly fast desktop (an actual desk-top, with a physical keyboard and keys that you have to press) in Arum and Rilla’s shared office to check Spacer news, which involved a lot of spelunking through webpages to find one that was actually from a Spacer news source. He kept getting results from Earthling news streams, which still use physical news-rooms and anchors rather than the text-to-speech programmes with algorithm generated faces on a greenscreen that Juno is used to. That plunged Juno down a rabbit-hole of watching anchors from newsrooms the world around being interrupted by animals and toddlers that have somehow gotten loose in the newsrooms.  
By the time he finally found what he was looking for, it hit him all the harder because he was disarmed by videos of toddlers scaling anchors’ legs and dogs howling through weather reports. It blindsided him. Suddenly, there was Hyperion City Hall, decked out for an inaguartion, and there was Mick, in the robes and gold of state with a hand on the original copy of the Martian Declaration of Settlement to be sworn in. His expression was solemn and professional right up to the point that he gave his speech, when the Mick that Juno knew bursts through and compared Hyperion City to a relative who needs to be taken to rehab.

It was true all along. Mayor Michael ‘Mick’ Mercury. Somehow, be it by political manoeuvring or divine intervention or a stupid accident, Mick got his behind in the mayoral office.  
Once Juno had had a good scream into his hands, he shut the computer down and tried to call Mick’s old number. Still connected. But it didn’t go through. 

Juno left a short voicemail that congratulated Mick on his recent win, ignoring the obvious question of how long Mick had been working towards that win and if he was ever going to tell Juno about it. That explains, at least, why Mick had missed two weeks of their chats before Juno was due to go undercover. Juno thought he was just busy with his classes, or had walked into an open manhole again and was busy being rescued by the fire department. 

Poor Mick. Going through the election process and unable, unwilling to tell Juno about it because he knows what talking about that shit will do to Juno’s nerves. But was he alone?

No. Sasha.

Calling Sasha has also occurred to him. Given the way it went the last time they talked and the context of why he would be reaching out at all, though, Juno is sure it would break down into a screaming match within a few minutes.  
Doesn’t matter that he is a slightly different lady with slightly healthier attitudes to death, now, because Sasha doesn’t know and may not care. She was on her way up through Dark Matters the last time they talked. Who knows how high up her current rung on the DM ladder is now? Must be significant, if they trust her enough to place her childhood friend in office.

Juno tries not to think too hard about Sasha when he makes these calls, which are daily at this point. He wants to assume the best of her until she proves him wrong. 

This call doesn’t go through. The next does not either, so Juno leaves his second voicemail, gently prompting Mick to get into contact whenever he can. He also hints that he has got something major to tell Mick, but not what- not that Mick has got Juno’s romantic partner and his gym partner in jail. That, Juno isn’t sure how to explain. He hasn’t yet told Mick what he’s doing off of Mars and Mick doesn’t ask, perhaps sensing that the confusion of explaining it would just upset the both of them and sour the easy communication they’ve got going right now.  
One thing at a time. Get moving off of Earth and then blow Mick’s mind. One thing at a time. 

By the time Juno sneaks back to the rest of the crew, the conversation has moved to a completely different topic and he is lost again. Angelo has already gone. Probably back to the Citadel, to muster up some kind of salvage crew. 

And Arum is repeating something that is evidently controversial, going by the crews’ faces “I think your best option is Utqiagvik.”

Oh ok. Now Juno understands. Of the three place-names that Juno knows on Earth, Utqiagvik is the last place they should be going. Everyone knows what happened with Jet’s parents. It was on the news, if only because it was the first time Dark Matters ever confirmed something described in leaked documents. 

She and Ruby start talking at the same time, which makes Juno’s head hurt both because of the noise and because it’s bewildering to think about where the hell Ruby’s voice is coming from.

“Utqiagvik as in the northernmost settlement in Nunangat-”

“- as in th’ place that’s got a month of night in winter-”

“- know that place, our kidnapped friend is from there!”

“- they find out we’re tryin’ ta find the Unnatural Disaster an’ bring him back, won’t they flip their lids at us an’, I dunno, burn us at the stake? Well maybe not the stake. They ain’t Massachusetts, after all, but y’know-”

“You are talking entirely too fast for me to follow,” says Damien. “What’s the issue? One at a time and slowly, if that’s no trouble.”

Again, Ruby and Rita talk at the same time. They start and stop several times and gesture at the other to continue, until finally Rita claps her a hand over her mouth and urges Ruby on.

“One of our missing crewmen is from Utqiagvik…and he didn’t leave it on good terms.”

Arum winces. “Ah, yes. I heard about what happened to his parents. We almost went up there, actually, but we didn’t arrive in time to help with anything save for pushing Dark Matters off the planet.”

“Why? Do you know someone up there?” asks Juno.

“Oh, sure. One of our brothers-in-law lives up there. He’s married to one of the Unnatural’s sisters, in fact.”

“Ok, this is a lot to process.” Vespa squats and puts her head in her hands, as if she has a migraine coming on. “So somehow we not only landed on a friendly patch of Earth, but we landed in the yard of somebody with a family connection to Jet? Is this pinging anybody else’s bullshit radars?”

Arum crosses all four of his arms. “Well, I’m not lying.”

“I’m not saying you’re lying. I’m saying- look, when you have a thing like I have, when coincidences line up like this, you don’t celebrate, ok? You- I worry that there’s a reason this shit is lining up.”

Buddy puts a hand on her shoulder. “Do you want to lay down for a bit, darling? I can catch you up on everything else if you like.”

“No.” Vespa gives herself a shake. “No, I want to be here. It’s not personal, Arum, it’s just the way my mind works.”

He uncrosses his arms. “Alright.”

Ruby shrinks herself down to a more manageable size and slithers around the ship to join the rest of them. Soup clings to a tentacle like a pirate on a listing crow’s nest, refusing to be put on the ground.

“How do we get to Utqiagvik from here? You said we’re in Thai and that’s got to be far away.”

“Eh, not that far.” Damien gestures vaguely over his shoulder. “About two days away by analogue travel. If this weren’t high summer we could just get on the train up to the north, zip up China and take the boat over from Russia. The problem is, the Bering strait and the sea have a no-fly order on right now. The whales are back, calving and having their meetings, so our engines are a tad bit disruptive at the moment. There’s a very tightly controlled quota. You would have had to lodge an application with the authorities on either side of the Bering to secure permission. Also, the dragons are mating and nesting up and down the coasts. They tend to attack anything bigger than a canoe during this time of the year.”

“So we are stuck.” surmises Buddy.

“Oh, no, not at all. We will have to take the long way around. Through Turtle Island.”

Rita groans. “On the trains?”

Damien nods. “The Penumbra trains, yes.”

“Ah narts. Ok. Ok. In that case, I gotta make a few calls.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everybody say it with me: Oh hi, Marc.
> 
> Why is Dampierre a dragon? Why are there dragons at all? Dunno.


	18. By the way, I like your tramp stamp

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: discussions childhood trauma, mentions of long-term affects of childhood trauma including detatchment disorders, discussions of passing a child among care-givers, waking up from medical coma, vulnerability, manipulation, character briefly thinks they are being spiritually possessed (they're not)
> 
> Suggested listening: 'William's Dirge', by The Family Crest

“Are we in Hell again?”

“No, honey.”

“Then how come there’s monsters everywhere?”

“We’re not. You’ve just never seen a lot of really tall people in the same place before.”

Soup remains suspicious and redoubles her grasp on Juno’s hand. At first she didn’t want to hold Juno’s hand because she was old enough to walk by herself, dammit, but the sights of the Citadel have proven too mesmerizing. The buildings and the castle and the riot of colours, all the tall, mighty-looking people, many of whom have that Arum-ish hint of inhumanity in their eyes and limbs where you don’t expect them, and Soup is so preoccupied with staring at everything and everyone that she keeps bumping into things. Arum, leading the way, would stop to permit foot or bike-traffic by and end up with Soup headbutting him in the calf. A few minutes ago she almost fell back into Buddy, trying to get a better look at a woman pushing eight feet with translucent wings coming out of the back of a low-cut shirt.   
For hers and everyone else’s safety, Juno has insisted that she hold his hand. They have only been in the city proper for fifteen minutes and Juno is pretty sure he’s lost a year of his life for each one of them. Tall people. Just…so many tall people.

In the five days that it has taken to prepare for this trip, it seem as though half of the Citadel made their way to the Keep to have a look at the Spacers. People kept turning up at the front door under the pretense of helping Angelo to carry away the wreckage, or asking Arum to look at a weird skin tag, even though that is his absent wife’s department and there are plenty of doctors in the Citadel. Most of them don’t get a chance to indulge their curiosity, however, being repulsed at the door by Damien’s firm but polite admonishments for trying to gawk, and Arum’s much more direct orders to stop treating the house like a zoo. Juno recognizes some of those same people attempting to have a gawk now, but Arum is just as firm about protecting Juno and Soup’s privacy as he was at the Keep, and shields them as much as he can.   
Given that most Spacers think Earth is a backwards place where people communicate by bonking each other in the head with sticks, it is rare to see a Spacer that is not also settled on Earth and therefore way less exciting. Most of their Spacer eccentricities will have been scrubbed away, like their attempts to use ‘money’ or ask why no one is driving private cars or point and scream at the folks on the street who clearly are not human and have no interesting in pretending to be.

Juno tried to ask where these people came from. These people who are not human in form and sometimes in behavior, but have the same access and involvement in society that their average-looking counterparts have. When did they appear? When were they accepted? Why are they looked on as mundane- as less than mundane? Just, completely normal people among other completely normal people who of course are going to have some aesthetic and biological differences, but they’re still completely normal people and…and the man has four arms! Four arms and crocodile teeth and claws that he can retract, and god only knows what Rilla looks like- and Damien isn’t fazed in the slightest! Of course he isn’t! Why would he be? This is his husband. 

“Where are you from?”

“Puerto Rico.”

“No I mean…like, where did you come from?”

Arum considers it. “A seed, I suppose. The Keep has always said I came out of a window box.”

_tktktktktktktktkt_

It’s going to kill Juno if he doesn’t figure out where that noise is coming from. 

“So…so you’re a plant? You’re a tree?”

“No.”

“Ok, but what are you, then? Where did you come from?”

“Puerto Rico.”

This leads Juno to the conclusion that either Arum is messing with him, or Arum did just spring out of the Puerto Rican soil. He looks like a plant. Stands to reason that he biologically behaves like a plant.   
Juno uses him like a plant today, in that he is standing in the shade Arum casts. Partly this is because he is sure direct sun will melt him if he stands under it for more than ten minutes cumulatively, and partly because Arum is making an effort to stay closer, to shield Juno and Soup with his own form. He made what seemed to be the outlandish choice of wearing a batik sarong and a voluminous purple cloak, but now that they’re out among the rest of the people, Juno sees plenty of others dressed in a similar fashion. 

Arum has done everything short of tucking Juno and Soup underneath his cloak like ducklings under a mother’s wing. Juno would be grateful for it if he wasn’t chest-height to Arum and being shielded from the view of passing traffic also often means standing face-to-face with possibly the most glorious set of pecs ever committed to flesh.   
It is making Juno sweat. He invokes Nureyev in his head, telling himself that he is a loyal lady and this man is married anyway. Those pecs are not out for you, Juno. Stop being creepy, Juno. But they keep drawing his eyes back. 

Once or twice, Arum asks Juno if he is doing alright, perhaps noticing how sweaty and strained he looks.

“Yep,” Juno has croaked each time, studiously looking away. “I’m perfectly fine.”

They left in two batches; Damien escorted Buddy, Vespa (carrying Guapo in a baby’s sling) and Ruby to the train station in the earlier morning, since they were tasked with getting the Carte Blanche into a cargo car. The streets being less populated nearer to dawn was also easier on the paranoia that hits Vespa when she’s in any new situation- but especially a situation so aggressively new and literally alien as this.   
The rest of them are following now, around noon, with the sun scathing at its zenith and the streets busy. In this crowd, Rita and Soup are basically tripping hazards, except Rita has got some obvious strategies for handling her size versus the size of the people around her. She basically has to narrate her actions for an audience of people a good meter above her head, so it’s a lot like listening to a sports announcer. Makes Juno wonder whether she talks the way she talks because she grew up having to announce herself, or if her personality is just organically suited to the task. Folks are not in the slightest interested in Rita. She’s got some kind of Earthling tell that Juno doesn’t recognize.

At the corner of an intersection where traffic has slowed around a bison that just decided to take a nap on the median, Soup tugs on Arum’s cloak and points. “Why are they dressed like that?”

He follows her finger across the intersection to a pair of folks in armor that looks, frankly, medieval- like the type of medieval that Andromeda wears, except this is clearly made of some sort of fibrous material that is closer to whatever Arum’s arms are made out of than to metal. They really do look strikingly like a couple of Andromedas with those round chest-plates that stop short of the midsection, giving way to a sort of reedy chainmail, then legs encased in the same reedy leggings with greaves and boots and analogue weapons. Again, they look like they robbed a museum and used their spoils to dress themselves for an Andromeda convention. 

“That’s their uniform. They’re soldiers, mija.”

“Do you guys have a war too?”

Arum sighs and harrumphs. “A war of sorts, I suppose. Not by the definition of, say, one nation or government attempting to crush the other, or a resource conflict, or one based in prejudice or doctrinal disagreements or anything like that- I seem to have lost you.”

“I’m interested.” offers Juno.

They step into the street and around the bison, snoozing happily in a pothole it seems to have gouged with its own body. Rita springs over a leg flung decadently out into the path, which baits Soup into copying her. Pre-emptively, Juno pulls up on Soup’s arm and gives her a lot more air than he meant to, so she’s hanging in space for a moment like a sugar-glider, but she lands neatly enough. Note to self: remember that you’re kind of buff and Soup weighs only a little more than the average beagle. Do not launch the child. 

“It ain’t a war,” continues Rita. “It’s more like a…a disagreement we been havin’. We got it where I came up too.”

“A protracted disagreement.” says Arum, taking a longer step to put himself between Juno and a man with a lot of eyes and no sense of subtlety. “With some very powerful forces that prevent us from easing into the quiet, conflict free void that Earth has been trying to achieve for a long time now.”

“Against?”

“Uh…it’s hard to describe.”

“It ain’t.” says Rita. “But it’s hard ta believe an’ understand if you ain’t grown up with it, y’know? It comes out at night. In the dark an’ stuff, but only in certain places. But ya gotta make sure it stays in those certain places, ‘cos if it gets loose an’ starts wandering, well, for us, first it goes for the sacred beings an’ we need ‘em to stay the way we are, y’know? Equilibrium an’ all that. You all got a pit near you?”

Arum points in the direction they are heading. “It’s been slipping in and out of dormancy for the last few decades. It was so bad for a while that the Citadel was calling in outside help and experts from all over- hence why I left where I held the lordship and became a, well, ‘lord of the swamp’, if our welcome mat is to be believed.”

“I was gonna ask about that.” says Rita.

“Yes, well, Rilla thinks she’s funny.” says Arum in a tone that indicates he does too. “At any rate, I came out here to help with the problems that this pit created when it was more active. We had quite a tussle with it and managed to push it back down, but not so much that it went completely silent.”

“Ain’t that always the way? Scuse me, sir, on your right, no, yer other right, little lady comin’ through an- thank you! Is yours nocturnal?”

“Heavens, no. I wish it were. It stirs whenever the mood strikes.”

Juno can’t stand this any longer. “Can I ask what the heck you guys are talking about?” 

“You kinda gotta be there ta get it, Mistah Steel,” Rita zig-zags around the legs of somebody who is a goat from the waist down. “Don’t’cha worry about missin’ out. Ain’t no quiet nights on Turtle Island. Most of our problems are nocturnal, so yer gonna see plenty from the train windows.”

“Like ghosts?” prompts Soup.

Arum helps her mount a steep curb. “Something like that. Ah, there they are.”

The train station kind of comes out of nowhere. Juno was expecting a grand affair with soaring buttresses and stained glass, or at least a subway entrance, but the building low and long, with platforms that butt right up against what looks like grazing land. There are no turnstiles and the reception office is staffed by one person, with their head in an anatomical textbook. They are so engrossed that they do not so much as glance up when Arum walks by with his weird little entourage, which is nice. Similarly, the rest of the platforms are sparsely populated and the one which is the furthest, where the Penumbra train sits, is unoccupied apart from the rest of the crew. Juno would guess that most people on the stripes of platforms are here for their daily commute or business in the next town over, as opposed to attempting to cross the world in a few days. Weird that they can just do that, if they choose to. And for free?

Juno keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop on this rescue mission in the form of some prohibitively expensive clean-up bill or ticket, but the other day, when he mentioned repaying Damien and Arum for all of their care, Damien told him that it was just nice to have some young blood in the house. There is a distinct possibility that Earthlings don’t even use money, which is a prospect as terrifying as it is exciting- at least that strikes off the possibility that Arum and Damien are going to hand them all off to the Kanagawas for an obscene bribe. 

Damien is talking and signing with a tall woman who reminds Juno of Alexandra because of the way she holds herself, and because she’s got shoulders that are broader than Juno is tall. God, there are so many hot people on Earth. Now Juno wishes Nureyev were here. If not to remind Juno that he’s already in a committed and closed relationship, then at least to check out the hot people with him.   
Vespa notices him and waves, while Buddy and Ruby have been completely distracted by a pair of horses that have trotted up to the edge of the platform to investigate the short people. 

The train is a sleek, streamlined thing that is segmented into two; the front half of the train is obviously for commuters, while the latter half is a thicker, reinforced, kind of like the backside of a spider. Also it’s scarred to all hell. It looks like the conductor attempted a shortcut through a briar patch.   
While Juno stares at the shallow scars on the body of the train and tries to guess what was scrabbling at it, Soup beelines to the horses.

“…be back in a few weeks.” says Damien. “Sooner if we can teleport on the way back, which we should be able to.”

“Don’t go into space if you can help it,” says the woman. “The rest of the galaxy already thinks Earthlings are a bunch of lunatic cave-men, and unleashing Arum on an unsuspecting populous will only confirm that impression.”

“Ah, Sir Caroline!” says Arum loudly. “I thought I smelled sulfur! How are you? How’s your lovely wife?”

Caroline meets Arum’s eyes with an expression that suggests she would rather push him onto the train tracks than respond. “Lovely as ever. How’s yours? Has she sent the divorce papers down from Utqiagvik yet?”

“What are you talking about? Have you perhaps mixed up our situations in your head? Speaking of, has Quanyii mentioned how she plans to divide up your assets in divorce court, or will that be something that requires judicial mediation?”

The temperature on the platform drops by about 18 degrees as Arum and ‘Sir’ Caroline size each other up. Then, with expressions of identical disdain, they look away from each other, Arum putting an arm around Damien and Caroline continuing to talk to Damien as if he is alone.  
Well that’s a bit of awkwardness that Juno wants no part of. He’d rather look at the horses.

They are enormous animals. Much bigger than their Spacer counterparts. Juno never had any training with the mounted police, but he remembers thinking those animals were pretty big. These absolute units on the fence and their friends milling about in the pasture behind make the mounted police horses look like ponies. 

Buddy is in the middle of identifying the type of horse they are to Ruby and Soup, the latter of whom Buddy has held up to the fence so she can get in on petting the horse that is the most down for it. Rita is listening attentively as well.   
“…type of gentlemen look like the descendants of draft horses to me, and we used to use those to pull wagons. My family shared a draft horse with one or two of our neighboring farms which we would use when the tractors broke down and needed to be dragged away, or if plowing needed some extra, well, hooves, in that particular season.”

Meanwhile, Ruby is staring so deeply into the eyes of her own horse that it looks like they might be communicating telepathically. Which is a thing Ruby can do.   
Her lips are moving almost silently, but Juno can hear, when he gets close, that she is just repeating: “Gorgeous girl.” under her breath. 

“They’re really enjoying those horses.” he says, joining Vespa beside the train once more. He figures it is better to let the women have their respective horse-moments in peace.

Vespa has folded her arms underneath Guapo and sways back and forth, as if rocking a baby to sleep. It seems to be working. Guapo’s many eyes are glazed and aimed at the ceiling. The first few inches of his barbed tongue hang out of his mouth.  
“Y’know, it’s a good thing that Nureyev isn’t here,” she remarks. “He’d have an aneurysm pretending he isn’t afraid of these guys. He was obviously afraid of Guapo. That reminds me, Juno, we’ve gotta figure out where we’re gonna rehome him.”

Juno scratches Guapo between two stubby stalks of his flaccid hair, which they have decided are his ears. “I’m not sure if there’s a rehoming service for this type of…of whatever Guapo is.”

“Rehome Guapo? Fuck that. We’re bonded now. I was talking about Nureyev.”

Juno laughs. “I’m gonna tell him you said that.”

“Ah, don’t. I shouldn’t tease him about being afraid of bigger animals. I’m sure there’s a deeper traumatic reason for his phobia than general pussy-ness.”

“I don’t know.”

“Aw, don’t worry, Juno, I’m not pumping you for info anything.”

“Good! Because I don’t have much to tell you.”

Rita warned him that she was going to investigate before they got on the train. Juno replied that that was fine, that she could dig as far as she wanted, but that he’d already seen and heard it all and there was no point in him going over it again. Last night they had a sort of information session. It was just Rita, Buddy and Vespa, as Ruby apparently felt the same towards Nureyev’s whole deal. She had been around for a lot more of his life than Nureyev let on. Apparently, in the immediate aftermath of Juno’s spectacular abandonment, Ruby was the one who brought up the idea of going to Jet to recover from it.  
She did this by repeatedly dialing Jet from the phone installed in her, which Nureyev made her hang up every time, but not without enough calls going through that Jet finally called Nureyev’s personal comms and asked him if they were hanging upside-down in a ditch somewhere. From there, getting the truth out of him was pretty easy because Nureyev was apparently crying a little bit and Jet is a sympathetic crier, and seeing someone you love cry for you just makes you more of a mess so Nureyev had to choose between his secrets or making Jet cry. 

She told him this while they sat outside with Soup, watching the water-birds fish and squabble, tuning out the cries of shock and cussing from the room where the others were touring Nureyev’s history. It made Juno laugh as much as it made him cringe with guilt. The idea of Nureyev being forced to open up to his friend because their car kidnapped him, and then being forced to take convalescence in Jet’s spare room.   
That Nureyev will let himself be comforted and taken care of is a comfort. That Nureyev went from the baby-step of admitting to a friend that he had a bad break-up to lunging across the chasm of surrendering his anonymity is less so. Juno knows that Nureyev’s health has been worsening. Like, at an exponential rate. Nureyev won’t tell him much more than that, but it doesn’t take a medical degree or a mind-reader to notice that he bruises easier now, and his appetite fades in and out, and his good days are fewer and far between. 

Goddamned cure-mother couldn’t pan out, could it? Oh well. Oh well. Don’t think about it. Grieve later, action now. Just appreciate that the others know, now, Nureyev’s name and the weighty history he has with New Kinshasa. 

“Buddy!” calls Damien. “Sword or knife?”

Buddy puts Soup down. “Beg pardon?”

“Caroline is here with weapons for us. Arum and I don’t have any to spare, really, since what Rilla lets us keep in the house is very specialized to us.”

Arum nods. “She won’t let me keep anything in the house but these knives.” suddenly, he is holding four knives. Beautiful, terrifying works of art, one for each of his limbs, and educational! Juno will never have to wonder again what it might look like if a tree could pick up a knife. “And poor Honeysuckle here has only his bow and the deadly weapon that is his body. You, however, are permitted by your wife to have as many weapons as you wish, yes?”

He looks to Vespa. Vespa shrugs. “She’s her own woman. And doesn’t usually sling shit around that’s a significant risk to the structural stability of what we’re living in.”

“Hence, here is Caroline, one of the heads of the community defense and key-holder to our collective weapons stash. So, sword or knife?”

Buddy smooths the front of her dress. She contains her glee by only the tiniest of margins. “I think I would like a sword, please.”

“Well,” Caroline draws something off her back. “I ordinarily wouldn’t give one of these to a Spacer, being that these are hard for Earthlings to wield, but I suspect you can handle yourself.”

She hands Buddy a weapon that is literally as big as Buddy is. The blade looks like it was pried out of a guillotine. Buddy braces herself and lifts it with ease, her muscles flexing beneath her dress so that the straps pretty much disappear into the hills of her biceps. Stepping backwards, Buddy gives it a test swing, from high over her head to a few centimetres above the floor.

“Yes, I think this will do.” drawls Buddy.

Caroline looks to Vespa. “And you?”

As seamlessly as Arum did a moment ago, Vespa produces a knife from some unseen pocket in her pants leg. “I brought my own stuff.”

“Is that…is that a scalpel?”

“Used to be. Now it’s a knife- no, Guapo, not for you.”

“Do you need anything with a longer range?”

Vespa considers it. “I do most of my fighting in close-range. I wouldn’t know what to do with long-range stuff, not really. Besides, I don’t trust my eyes anymore. They lie to me a lot.”

“Are you sure you don’t want some smokescreens-”

“Yes. Yes I do.”

Rita is a non-combatant. Ruby is her own weapon. Soup asks for a stun gun, which she is denied and ushered sullenly aboard the train. The train will be pulling out in a few minutes, and it’s better to get Soup settled before the train starts moving than after. Rita distracts Soup with the task of locating the cousin of hers that is controlling the train, then Arum and Damien help the women find their carriage, and this leaves Juno with Caroline. 

“You’re Juno, yes? I can’t help but notice you’ve got one eye. What are you using right now, to fight?”

“A blaster.”

“And how’s that going for you?”

“It’s going ok. I’m able to hit things that I aim for like, 55% of the time.”

“Would you flex for me?”

Juno stares at her. “I have a boyfriend. We’re exclusive.”

“And I’m exclusive to my wife. I want to see if you could draw back a bowstring.”

Obediently, Juno flexes. Caroline appraises his arms with a nod and has him spin around. “What’s your exercise routine like?”

“Uh, I lift a bit on my own, but apart from that it kind of depends on the whims of my gym partner.”

“Ever used one of these before?” she puts a long, heavy bow in his hands- where is she keeping these?

It’s a cross between the high-tech compound bows that he has seen Cecil use to chase folks around his Maze of Death and the archaic stuff that you see on ancient vases. Juno pulls back the string. There’s some weight to it, for sure, but it is no task for Juno to draw the string all the way back and raise it up as if he means to put an arrow through the train’s window. 

“Are there arrows for this thing?”

“No. If you assume the proper form and pull the string fully back, one will knock itself. Magic, and all that.”

How often is Juno gonna hear that word and have to accept it like a proper explanation?

“Are you her father?” 

Juno lowers the bow. “Huh?”

“The child that is with you. Are you her father?”

Anxiety knots in his stomach. He is not ready to have this conversation with anyone, let alone a stranger he just watched verbally wrestle Arum across the train station. “No.”

“Damien gave me a basic idea of where she came from. Something about mothers on a satellite. I assumed part of the reason you were there was to rescue her from whatever chaos was going on up there. That you were estranged or something. But if she’s not your daughter…”

“She asked us for help. The man I was up there with, she- she, uh figured out that we weren’t who we said she were and she ran to us for help. Her mothers weren’t good to her.”

Caroline’s eyes narrow. Damn, she’s a big woman. Seven foot four if Juno had to guess. Hot, thinks the part of his brain which is devoted to bisexuality- the only part that isn’t currently paralyzed by anxiety.   
No! Not hot. Focus! 

“What are your plans after you get those men back from Mars? You were working on some kind of snake oil, yes?”

“Well, no. Working on finding the real, uh, ambrosia, if we wanna talk like that, the real ambrosia that it comes from. And we did. It’s just…not what we expected.”

Caroline frowns. “And now?”

“And now we get the rest of our family back. We re-group. We figure out our next step.”

“As fugitives wanted by the majority of Spacer law enforcement, I assume?”

“Well yeah, but that was always true-”

“And her biological parents are completely out of the question? What of her biological family?”

“Have you ever heard of the Kanagawas?”

She grunts. “Ah, ok. That is a problem. I assume you’re worried that she would be tracked down by them, were you to settle her with a Spacer family? Why do you think they would?”

“Because I don’t think her mother died. One of them, anyway, and she was a stubborn piece of work.”

Caroline cuts across him. “Here is what I suggest you do. In two days, you’ll meet Marc. Whatever I think of his sister’s choice in men, he comes from a good family. He has made himself a good family in Utqiagvik. You should leave the child with him and his wife. They already have a daughter whom they’re raising well, and they have mentioned wanting more children except for some, well, personal medical issues that complicate the matter. I suggest that you take the child to Marc and leave her somewhere she can be protected. Reliably protected. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t exactly have a five-year plan, do you?”

“No.” says Juno, feeling like a kid in front of the principal.

“Children are as vulnerable as they are hardy. They need stability in their care-givers, or it can cause a host of problems in later life.”

“I know that.” comes out sharper than he means it.

She gives him a searching look. “If you do, then that is all the more reason to provide her with the stability that you may not be able to offer. Frankly, I’m surprised that Damien and Arum didn’t broach the subject with you…well I’m not surprised that Arum didn’t. His people can walk and commit armed robbery ten minutes after they’re born, so he doesn’t necessarily understand how dependent human children are on their caregivers. And Damien, perhaps he didn’t think it was his place. I do not care whether or not it is my place to be telling you what to do with this child you’ve picked up like a souvenir, however, and I think you should act with more forethought in the future. Exposing her to Space Hell, really?”

“She was asleep.”

“But she woke up knowing what she had gone through. In just a few days, she seems to have lost her parents and the world of her formative years. One of the men who saved her apparently sustained a near-fatal wound. She was carried through a battlefield and then taken away to an unfamiliar situation, populated by unfamiliar and intimidating people, whose trouble she was immediately embroiled in. That is a case of PTSD at the least and a host of abandonment issues, maladaptive coping strategies and personality disorders-”

“I already told you I know, ok? You want to talk about bad parenting that follows you into adult life? My mother shot my twin brother because she thought he was me.”

Behind them, a rapping on the glass. Soup hammers on the window. When she sees she has caught his attention, she grins, fogs the glass with her breath and writes ‘HURRY UP’ with her finger.

Juno holds up his hand to show her two more minutes, then goes back to Caroline. “I know what a rough start can do. I know what it’s like to lose your childhood.”

Caroline’s gaze drifts to the sleeve of Benzaiten “Alright. Apparently you do. Then I would hope you do right by her.”

With an air of finality, she walks the way Juno and the others just came.

“Sir Caroline.”

The woman glances back at him. 

“I already love her. I’m going to do right by her. Whatever that looks like, I’m going to do right by her.”

“I believe you.”

And then there’s an impatient little hand on Juno’s collar, tugging him into the train.

(Two and a half weeks later, Jet)

_Wake up_

Jet sits up in bed. A man perched far too close to his bedside bolts up with a cry of shock. 

_\------- careful with yourself. ---- hurt as hell the last time I saw you-----_

Headache. Splitting headache. His vision blurs. His head throbs. 

_Relax._ this voice, fading in and out like a radio fighting through static, the pain ebbing with it _Relax. It’ll stop hurting------ let me in-----just calm down----_

“You’re awake!” exclaims the man who was keeping vigil. Lord have mercy. It’s Cecil Kanagawa. Of course it’s Cecil Kanagawa!

The last time Jet saw this awful little man in the flesh, Cecil was a snarly pre-teen who bullied the servants and clung to his fathers’ legs every time it looked like he was about to be punished. He still looks every bit like the smarmy little bastard Jet remembers, except he has a prosthetic arm and about thirteen years on him. 

Jet is realizing now that his head isn’t the only thing that hurts. His body aches, his joints stinging like open wounds as he turns his arms over, checking himself for obvious wounds. Not only is the gigantic knife wound gone from his arm, but the arm looks better than before he was stabbed, shiny and unscarred, the tattoo gone from the inside of his elbow and the old track marks that pockmarked his bigger veins. There are new needle wounds. From IV’s in his other arm, in the wrist lower down, and then a few sensors suctioned to his chest and throat. Before he can think the better of it, Jet tears the needles and tubes out of himself, ripping away the gauze that has glued it to him, the anti-atrophy bracelets clamped on either wrist. 

His legs tremble slightly as he swings his legs over the side of the bed and plants his feet on the ground. He stands, without pain. 

_\---be gentle with yourself---been out for a long----be careful_

“What did you do to me?” he growls.

On the other side of the bed, Cecil shrugs. “Kept your arm from falling off, for starters. You’re welcome!”

“To my head!”

_\---wait---not_

“What?”

“There’s- there’s a voice.”

“Are those maybe your thoughts?”

All of a sudden there is a painless vacuum. It feels like a giant weight has just fallen out of the back of his head. Jet staggers back a few steps, his back meeting some kind of monitor.

“That wasn’t- where is he?”

An awful little smile spreads across Cecil’s face. “Who?”

“The man that came with me.”

Cecil circles the bed, coming towards him. “No one came with you, Unnatural.”

“Don’t even try that. I know he came with me. I saw him. I heard him. I can still smell his cologne because that stuff lingers for weeks afterwards.”

Cecil’s tone has become placating and reasonable. “Now, now, be reasonable. You’re extremely disorientated right now. You’ve been unconscious for two weeks, almost-”

“Absolutely not,” Jet snaps. “I am absolutely not going to deal with this.”

“Deal with-”

Jet tosses his pillow at Cecil, for lack of any better projectiles. “Deal with you! Stay where you are. If you try to come within spitting distance of me I’ll punt you through the wall, you awful little homunculus. Where is he?”

Cecil laughs. “That’s a bit excessive, don’t you think?”

“Excessive? I could drop a nuclear bomb on you without finding it excessive. I’ve seen what you do- no, do not move towards me. Do not smile at me. I swear to God-”

The sheer panic of waking up, trapped in a room with Cecil Kanagawa slinking towards him, moves Jet to jump up onto the breathing apparatus. He’s up there like Pakak, standing on Ruby’s hood to avoid a friendly street-dog, and for the first time he feels some of the crawling fear that Pakak’s phobia must induce every time he is confronted with a huge animal.   
And Cecil won’t stop coming at him with that eerie smile. His work-calloused hands close and open in anticipation of whatever it is he plans to do to Jet. 

Jet draws a deep breath. He has got to calm down for Pakak’s sake. If he was out for two weeks, who knows what they will have done with Pakak? What if they’ve let him fallow and sicken for the entire time Jet’s been out? One thing at a time. Don’t worry about if they’ve comprised your sobriety, don’t worry about whatever voice they might have put in your head- worry about Pakak. Worry about Pakak.

“-be civil about this.” Cecil is saying. “We’re going to be working together. Well, you’re going to be working for me, specifically, but I want to start out with a good relationship.”

“Alright,” says Jet. “You want a good relationship with me, there are a few ground rules that you’re going to need to follow.”

“You’re gonna dictate to me from on top of a machine? Standing up there like a school kid running away from a mouse?”

Jet is way too tired and pissed off to be embarrassed about this. “Yes I absolutely am. You think this is cowardice on my part? When a snake slithers into your house, what do you do, attempt to meet it on its level? No. You climb on something taller so you can scoop it up from above and avoid the damned fangs. Now are you going to listen to me or are you going to make me argue?”

Cecil crosses his arms and sighs dramatically. It’s a gesture that reminds Jet so powerfully of his older sisters, when he asked them for something and they would get all huffy and pissy and expend more energy letting him know how inconvenient this was than it would have taken to just do the thing for him.   
God, Jet misses his sisters. He tells himself to hold onto that. Hold onto how much he misses his sisters, how much he misses YJ, and harness that energy to ensure that he doesn’t miss the one brother he’s still got. 

“Go ahead.”

“Do not lie to me.” says Jet. “I can tell when I am being lied to and I do not appreciate it. Secondly, you do not attempt to come between me and my family.”

The pain flares up. So bad that Jet almost cannot hear Cecil’s response. He cannot hear it over the roar in the back of his head- shouting over a huge distance, but muffled, as if that distance is filled by fog.

_Don’t move around. I can feel how much your body is hurting. Please, be careful with yourself._

Jet shuts the voice out as much as he can; he needs to concentrate on what and who is in front of him, much as he would like to go all the way with this apparent mental break and just pass out on the floor. 

“Hello? Are you in there?” Cecil snaps the fingers of his metal hand, which make a noise like a chime. “Do you read me?”

“What did you say?”

“I was mocking you, actually. I was just remarking on how quickly you went from being a mouse to a lion. You know, first you’re scurrying up medical equipment and now you’re cussing me out. And I just think it’s funny to claim such devotion to your ‘family’, if that’s what you’re calling it, considering what happened to your parents. I know a bit about family murdering family myself! My sister did it to our poor dear Daddy, rest his soul, and I’ve thought about doing it a few times to our step-mother, just because that’s the sort of thing that crosses your mind every now and again-”

“The threat to kick you still stands.”

“Fair! Alright! Just because you’re livening up my afternoon, I’ll tell you. They wanted me to gas-light you into thinking that you were alone and the Rex Glass fellow was a hallucination, but what the hell! I’m not here to make their jobs easier for them! Besides, I feel like he could be good leverage. He’s alive.”

In spite of himself, Jet relaxes a little bit. “And his health?”

“Oh, atrocious. But he was like that when Dark Matters picked him up. We haven’t hurt him. I heard he almost broke somebody’s arm and he definitely tried to bite me when I came close to him. Like, actually bite me! Those teeth aren’t cosmetic. Are they natural?”

“I’m sure you provoked him.”

“I only offered to help! I told him, look, I can replace that kidney that is troubling you with a kidney that, admittedly, will have a bunch of trackers inside of it like your friend’s arm and will maybe secrete a special serum that should, theoretically, make you shoot lasers out of your eyes, but I haven’t been able to find human trial test subjects yet so I can’t say for sure-”

“Trackers.”

“Yes, trackers. GPS.”

Cecil’s grin returns.

“You didn’t think we fixed you arm out of the goodness of our hearts, did you? You’re an investment, Jet. May I call you that?”

“You may not.”

“It may be upsetting to hear now, but I promise, later on, you’re going to be grateful to us. We’re going to make some real change in the world-”

“I haven’t got the slightest interest in what you plan to use me for. Tell me exactly where he is and what is being done to him.”

Cecil deflates a bit. “Oh, you’re no fun. Well, look, obviously, he is being treated. We know he’s sick. We know it is late stage PKD and he’ll probably be dead of it in a few months-”

They know more about Pakak’s condition than Jet, then. Jet will be angry with him for hiding it later, assuming they survive.

“-funny to me that you’d associate yourself with this kind of person. I know about your career. I’ve seen the movies and stuff. I know that you prefer to do things above-board, don’t you? You prefer to have your name attached to things. You’re a straight forward, honest guy, so why would you associate yourself with a guy who is, and I mean this literally, a shadow of a shadow? There’s nothing on him.” Cecil has begun to grind his teeth. “I mean, we have three names, but we know that’s just the surface. Our information networks have suddenly gummed up. If I were a paranoid person I’d say it was revenge for working with DM or crossing Buddy Aurinko, or something, but I’m not a paranoid person- that’s Cass’s department. I just think you made an out of character call, by being close, uh, comrades with this Rex Glass. Or Titanius Minthe.”

“Who?”

“Titanius Minthe. It’s one of his aliases. He used it to infiltrate that cybernetic organ syndicate. I believe you helped him?”

Jet shakes his head irritably.

“Hidalgo Roman, then?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Really? You call the guy a member of your ‘family’ and you don’t even know what he calls himself?”

“I don’t, no.”

Cecil blinks. “Huh. I can’t tell if you’re noble or stupid.”

“And I can’t tell if you’re being deliberately obtuse or if you’re only smart when you’re in a lab grafting some poor animals together. Do you plan to let me see him?”

“No. What do you think we are, stupid?”

“Then leave me.”

“I just told you we’re not stupid-”

Gingerly, Jet slides down the machine and plants himself on the ground again. Might as well use the size difference to his advantage, if nothing else. He tries not to be afraid of Cecil. He tries not to think about what that metal arm could tear off of him if the mood strikes Cecil. 

“If you are not, as you insist, a fool, then you will leave me alone for the hour or so I require to collect myself. After an hour, I am sure I will be a much more reasonable, rational pawn. But as of this moment I am quite agitated and perturbed to find myself suddenly in- Hoosegow, yes? Of course. To find myself in Hoosegow in the custody of a one of the foulest creatures that Satan ever tossed into the world, not to mention separated from a terminally ill family member. Now, think about what I have just said. Think about it carefully and when you have finished, tell me if you think it is a good idea to stay in this very small room, baiting me.”

Cecil laughs. His voice shakes as he does.

“Me? Foul? Satan spawn? Well, it must be true, because it takes one to know one.”

But he’s moving towards the door.

“Dashing as you look in your hospital jumpsuit, it’s hardly appropriate for work. I’ll have something sent up to you. What size are you?”

“Guess.”

“By the way, I like your tramp stamp. I wouldn’t have put you down as the type for one, but-” and then he is running because Jet has begun to pick up the hospital bed.

“Not that I’m judging!” he yells as he shuts the door. “We all did funny things in our twenties!”

Jet can count on one hand the number of times he has cried out of fear in his adult life. Once, when he missed falling into a black hole by a margin of seconds and a few meters. During Pakak’s long silence when he was trapped in that Martian tomb, when Jet was going as far to research whether it was sacrilegious to do the body-cleansing ceremony for a Muslim if you weren’t also Muslim. The first time he ever had to perform CPR, which also happened to be on a friend who only just survived- he still feels guilty about breaking so many of Chiara’s ribs in the process.  
This moment feels very close to becoming the fourth time. The only thing that is stopping him from it is the indignity of knowing that Cecil Kanagawa must have seen a lot of him, if he saw Jet’s tramp stamp: crossed pistols over the unfurling flags of aromantic and asexual pride. He was extremely mad at allosexuals and romos when he got it and the ketamine that was generally in his system back then prevented him from thinking too far ahead, and here are the consequences, a decade and a bit later, confronting him at the worst possible moment.

Fear is slowly being supplanted by anger and the feeling of violation. He hopes Cecil tries to come back in. 

Trackers! In his goddamned arm! 

_Calm down. Breathe for me._

“Oh, shut up.” says Jet, aloud. “I don’t need your input.”

The voice carries on as if it cannot hear him, soothing and insistent. Maybe it cannot hear him.

“Who are you?” he says, sitting on the edge of the bed.

_Better. That’s better._

They definitely cannot hear him when he speaks through his mouth. So, he tries speaking from inside of his head. Tries to imagine a floor across the bottom of his mind, balling up a thought and flicking it towards the back.

_Who am I?_ the voice repeats.

He wasn’t expecting that to work. He tries with another balled-up thought to make sure this isn’t a fluke or his imagination.

The response comes immediately and clearly _No, Jet, I’m not God….yes, I’m sure._

The Devil? The Devil. Which means Jet is in hell. Explains why he was trapped in a tight space with Cecil Kanagawa.

_You’re not in hell, you goof. This is Hoosegow._

Same difference.

_Ok, sassy, take some deep breaths for me. Calm down. Remember, you’re the Unnatural Disaster. And a Sikuliaq. Sikuliaqs don’t climb up on life-support machines when little venture capitalists give them a spook._

This one does.

He asks again. Who is this person in his head? If it’s not God and not the Devil-

_I’m not your guardian angel either! I’m not sure if your mom was right about you having one, Jet, but I’m not them! Please, just, calm down. Look. Watch this._

A thought rolls towards him like a marble rolling across the floor. Jet catches it. Turns it over. Finds himself, young, grief-raw and high, framed in the heavy door of a secured garage. 

Did he really look like that, back then? Haunted and hungry, and so obviously, shockingly like a child? Only a Spacer could mistake him for anything else. They would just see his dimensions as adult, although he will not have finished growing for another two years. Baby-fat stripped off his face early, muscles from rowing from an early age and fishing. Dustings of a beard because he hadn’t yet developed the habit of shaving daily. Tired, tired eyes that are usually associated with wisdom.  
Jet recognizes himself. He recognizes the day. The blood, on his shirt, as belonging to M’tendere Beza, and the bulge in his pocket as their untested super-weapon. He hears his own voice, still kind of crackly because he’s still only 17 and his voice did that until he was 20, and the wildness in his young voice fills Jet with a chilling feeling of kinship. This child is him. This child will always be him. 

“Fuck me, you are green.” he says. “Still a beauty, though, aren’t you?”

Talking to the car the way he once talked to the over-curious seals that would come too close to his sister’s umiaq. Firm, because he didn’t want them to get too friendly and end up dumping him and Emanoraq into the water. Courteous, because he was aware of the seals as powerful creatures with teeth that could de-sleeve his flesh from his bones if he pissed them off. 

“You hear me?”

A whistle in response. The way it kind of echoes through his chassis, or his skull, makes Jet realize that this perspective is the Ruby’s. 

In recognition of his recognition, the voice in his head says _Yeah, it’s me._

Jet sees his younger self smile. “And how do you feel about getting the fuck out of this garage?”

_I know that you know that I’m sapient._ says Ruby. _I know that you knew the first time you touched my steering wheel. I know it scared you to hell, too, so I forgive you for pretending you didn’t know._

_What is your name?_

Jet sees his younger self approach and lay a deferential hand on the hood of the car, almost genuflecting. He feels the warm, clammy pressure of his hand on the hood like a hand brushing him through clothes, and he hears Ruby’s thoughts from more than twenty years ago as she decides that, for her purposes, Jet will do as a pilot, because he is the first pilot to ask her what she wants before he gets behind her wheel. 

_What’s my name? Jetty, you couldn’t pronounce it even in your head. Just call me what you’ve always called me._

He feels himself sliding into the driver’s seat and testing the pedals. The give of the wheel and the steering column.

“Ready to fuck some stuff up-”

As one, the Jet of the past and the Jet of the present.

“-Ruby?”, _Ruby?_

_Yep ,_ says Ruby7. _I’ve got to go, but we’re almost there. Just hold on._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jet is the kind of car-owner who won’t let you get in the car with freshly painted nails or wet hair, but he will drive with an un-lidded cup of tea balanced precariously in the designated change-dump cup holder. 
> 
> Also, my notes for Jet and Cecil’s confrontation looked like this.
> 
> Cecil: Hey, what’s up? 
> 
> Jet: (standing on a chair) The power of Christ compels you!


	19. And the story gets impossibly stupider.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: use of weapons (bows), discussions of childhood trauma by neglectful parents, discussion of abduction and non-consensual surgeries, implication of past drug use, mention of nerve pain, mention of (fake) execution by lethal injection.
> 
> Suggested listening: Biffy Clyro, 'The Captain'

(Juno)

“Welcome, travelers, to the Penumbra. If you look to the right-hand side you will see we are currently approaching Lijiang City, of the Yunnan province. All passengers departing in Lijiang are asked to make sure they take all of their possessions from the train. Those of you making connections to Russia, Tibet, Korea and Japan will be escorted to your connections from the platform. We kindly ask that passengers who will be travelling further with us today to have patience, as it will take about twenty minutes to load and unload cargo. We will make another announcement ten and five minutes before the train departs again. Please do not feed the dragons. As always, we here at the Penumbra Network hope you have had a pleasant journey with us.”

‘Please do not feed the dragons’ becomes the major refrain of the journey. Juno thought it was an inside joke until he looked out the window and saw that, no, in fact, ‘dragons’ was not code for pigeons, but just meant ‘dragons’. Like Andromeda’s steed or frequent enemies. But where Andromeda’s dragons were ferocious, slavering dinosaur-like beasts that spewed hatred and flame, these dragons are much smaller and benign. They roost on the curved rooves of Lijiang in shining, feathery ranks, preening and chattering at such a volume that Juno can hear them through the opened windows in spite of the speed they’re travelling at. The whole city glistens with the traffic of dragons going between the mist-hung mountains and the city rooves, where they sun themselves and peck at roof tiles with beaks that could probably crack stone.   
Interspersed among these little rotund fellas are bigger, longer dragons that are shaped like streamers- actually, very much like the one the goddess Benzaiten is often depicted with. Down to the moustache-like whiskers and the short manes and everything. 

The dragons are only the second weirdest thing Juno has seen in the last hour; title of the first weirdest goes to the way the train moves. A small amount of its travelling is done on actual, physical train tracks, which it seems to share with local commuter infrastructure. Most of it happens in a tunnel of purplish energy that springs out of nowhere, engulfs them, encases them for a half hour or so, and then spits them out again in a totally different biome.   
The change from dense, wet jungle to dense, wet evergreen disorientated Juno so much that he didn’t even remember to be grateful for the change in climates. 

A couple of minutes after the train has pulled into Lijiang’s station, a tired looking man in a crisp purple uniform ambles out into the diner car where they have been waiting, and taps Rita on the shoulder.

“Hey, how you been?” Rita reciprocates an awkward side-hug.

“I’ve been on a train, Rita. That’s about it.” 

“Guys, this is my cousin, Kevin Penumbra. We grew up together in Manhattan. An’ who all else is on shift with you?”

“Just me and Joshua.”

“Aw, how is Joshua? What’s he been up to?”

“He’s been on a train, Rita.”

Doesn’t look like a reunion after Rita’s over twenty years of absence. Looks like a pair of people who didn’t like each other in high school meeting in a coffee shop, unaware that their silent dislike was mutual, so they feel compelled to acknowledge and ask after each other’s careers. They manage a few more stilted bits of conversation before Kevin makes his excuses and returns to the conductors’ car at the front of the train.  
Juno is not the only one to have noticed the awkwardness; Vespa’s jaw is about to dislocate she is clenching it so hard, and Damien actually removed his hearing aid to avoid having to listen. 

As soon as her cousin is gone, Rita deflates. She leans into Juno and takes a slug of the fresh batch of that medicinal coffee, the olala, that Arum just poured for everyone out of a thermos.

“I figured he’d stay in the family business,” she says, morose. “I figured most of ‘em would. Far as I know, I’m the only one that’s left the family business in the last two generations.”

“Rita, darling, tell me if I’m overstepping my bounds, but…”

“It’s ok,” Rita takes a long drag of the olala. “Whew! That’s strong. That’s what I need. Uh, I left Earth because, well, this is an ok job for some folks, like, Kevin an’ Joshua an’ Kate an’ all my other cousins, they ain’t too bothered about doin’ it. I just didn’t want to, you know? I just didn’t wanna spend my whole life on a train an’ my parents said it would be ok for me to, y’know, travel and all before I settled down and got to work runnin’ the spells and portals, but I just couldn’t face the idea of comin’ back.”

Buddy squeezes her hand. “I was going to ask if your last name is ‘Penumbra’.”

“Oh!”

“Same here,” says Juno. “Not that I ever did a lot of paperwork back when we were in the office, but every time I needed to put down your last name I had to just put an X down.”

Rita grins. “I kinda got used to not mentioning it as much as I could down here, you know? People hear you’re a Penumbra an’ there’s really only one group of us. They wanna know all about th’ magic an’ you just wanna book an appointment or cancel yer internet package an’…I guess I forgot that most people up in space don’t know that Earth even has trains like this, let alone a family of wizards that runs ‘em.”

“Are you a wizard?” asks Soup.

“Eh, kinda?”

“It’d be cooler if you just said yeah. I mean, I’m a kid. I’m not gonna know if you’re lying. How do you become a wizard? Can I be a wizard if I wanted to be?”

“You can be anything you want to be.” says Rita, seriously. “Except resistant ‘ta the vacuum ‘a space without a suit. An’ the pressure ‘a the deep sea. Ok, there’s a few limits on th’ human body, but apart from those limits, kiddo, you can be and do whatever you want.”

“Can I drink this?” Soup starts to reach for the thermos of olala.

“Absolutely not.” Juno stuffs the thermos into the deep pockets of his doti salwar.

And the whole day kind of goes like that. After they move out of Yunnan and further up, into the steppe-lands, everyone kind of breaks off to do their own things. No matter how desensitized the crew of the CB are to each other, there are limits to everybody’s patience. These last few days have been trying. At the beginning of the week Juno was being tortured in the basement of a community center. Now he’s on another planet and shares the responsibility for the well-being of a verbose eight year old and a silent alien, both of whom are incredibly traumatized. Also, he was kind of taunted with the ghost of his long-dead baby brother. That’s a lot to process.  
And now that Juno has made himself recognize that he does need time to process things, that he can’t just shoulder-charge his way through disaster after disaster while also keeping his shit together, he goes a lot easier on himself. Relaxes when he can. Lays down, lets himself think things through and cry if he needs to. Talks to G-d about them, aloud or in his head depending on the mood and the level of privacy. 

Today he feels mostly ok. The idea of travelling across the world has galvanized him a little bit- put a hunger for action into him. And since there’s no one with whom he can justify a fist-fight on the train, Juno decides to try out the borrowed bow and arrow instead. 

Of course, there is a kind of shooting galley just in front of the cargo train. Apparently Earthlings expect to be fighting regularly enough that they need practice arenas on hand wherever they go. Juno still has no idea what their enemies might look like but, as he holds the door of the galley open for a man wearing an (occupied) baby-sling on his chest and a giant axe on his back, Juno is beginning to hope that he doesn’t ever get a glimpse of them. 

He thought Sir Caroline might have been yanking his chain when she said the arrows materialized when he assumed the proper form. She was not. They kind of just blink into existence as pieces of solid, fletched light when he has got the bowstring all the way back. It only takes Juno a few tries with the bow to get a bullseye on the target- in the center of the chest, at that.   
A goddamned bullseye. Suddenly, he’s got his sharpshooting back, as if the last four years of bad depth perception and missing his targets by embarrassing margins never happened. In three minutes, Juno hits ten more. Just to make sure that the strength of the olala hasn’t got him hallucinating the win he needs so badly, he calls Buddy in and has her confirmed that he can, in fact, hit the human-shaped target between the eyes. 

“Why didn’t I think of this before?” exclaims Juno. “I can hit whatever I want! Depth perception can go fuck itself!”

“I am sure it will, darling.”

Juno cannot justify more than 45 minutes of this practice before the guilt of leaving Soup to her own devices gets to him. So he puts the bow away in the sleeper car that he is sharing with her and Rita. It ends up beside the Martian’s briefcase. Now, Juno won’t pretend he feels entirely comfortable with sticking an injured person on a luggage rack…but Ruby said it would be ok and carrying them around all day would just disturb them more.  
Still, Juno spends a few minutes talking into the briefcase. He tells the Martian that things are progressing at a steady clip and, with luck, they should have Jet and Nureyev back in a few days. That may or may not involve taking on Dark Matters and the Kanagawas at the same time. Depends. For now, though, the Martian should just relax and be secure in the knowledge that they are safe and will never again be tapped for cure-mother. He feels better after talking to them, even when he gets down and realizes that the door was open and a bewildered steward was watching him whisper into the luggage rack. 

Juno tracks Soup down to the common car, where the travelers who aren’t taking over-night trips are hanging out. She has found a booth next to a good stretch of windows and has her nose up to the glass. The purplish tissue of the universe whips by, at once like electricity and the mineral filaments suspended inside of a piece of quartz. Arum and Ruby stayed with her, similarly transfixed by what is outside.   
Silently, Juno slides into the booth beside Soup and watches with her. They only start to speak again when the purple gives way to a forested land riddled with lakes and fjords. Arum identifies if as ‘Finland’, which briefly convinces Juno that this is a land populated by fish who’ve learned to walk on land. Soon, though, they come out into the snowy pocket of a township that is rustic to Juno’s eyes, but probably far more comfortable to live in than the high-tech sprawl of Hyperion. That there are just trees and shrubs and bits of uncleared land hanging out is very weird to him. Up in space, the natural world exists inside little planned bubbles, or else has pushed roots through the odd abandoned building. 

They are stopped at a cross-walk. Being that they are close to the front of the train, the three of them can easily see whom they have stopped for: a string of school children in neon cold-weather clothes pad and slip across the tracks in pairs, shepherded between a couple harried teachers. Even at this age, the Earthlings are bigger than they should be. Like, he can’t tell if it’s the layers of down and plastic encasing them or if those kids are kind of buff. The little girl who brings up the rear, hand-in-hand with her teacher, she definitely looks like she could beat Juno at arm-wrestling.  
Not one of them has fins. Visible fins, at least. 

Then Soup wants to go exploring. She dismisses Arum and Ruby, but clasps onto Juno, and has him walk the length of the train with her. Each time the conductor announces a new stop, they have to dash for a window to observe it. Even though Soup is tall enough to see over on her own, she wants Juno to pick her up for a ‘birds eye view’ each time. She points out herds of fast-passing animals and asks their names. Juno makes them up or guesses. He is always wrong, which Soup seems to know. But she doesn’t care. She’s just happy with his company.

In the evening they come to a full stop on a few kilometers of track outside of Khabarovsk, finding the train’s way blocked by a thick herd of animals Rita identifies as ‘saiga antelopes’. The train half empties as passengers hop out, flapping scarves and jackets, clapping their hands, shouting to wave the antelope off of the tracks. Buddy and Juno go out with the intention of helping, but once they get a proper look at the animals, at their pendulous, old-man-butt looking noses, the two of them become liabilities themselves because they cannot stop laughing, and have to be carried back into the train by Damien.  
At dinner, Kevin makes a second appearance for another round of awkward small talk. Juno can’t help but notice that they are not talking about Rita’s parents. For as long as Juno’s known her, Rita has invoked her mother as a reason not to do anything risky or risqué and done it without a hint of baggage. Either she’s a better actor than Juno thought or she didn’t fully realize how much trouble she might be in with her parents. 

Juno isn’t sure if he should be jealous of what she was able to do. To just, get up and go. To leave and never speak to her parents again unless she initiates the interaction. But what did it cost her? Was she thinking about costs when she did it? Was she thinking about anything when she did it? Or did she just go? The fact that she had the option to cut contact at all, let alone without thinking about the consequences of what she was doing, Juno is jealous of that. Trying very hard not to be jealous. It’s not working.

Juno tucks Soup into bed around eight o’clock, then passes another hour and a half in the shooting galley. By the time he is ready for bed, Rita and Soup are both conked all the way out.   
About half an hour after he lays down, Juno begins to understand what Rita and Arum meant when they spoke about pits and the vague troubles they apparently produced. 

It starts as a noise so soft he assumes it is coming from somewhere within his body. He can sometimes hear his own spinal fluid as he’s trying to fall asleep in a quiet place, so he blames the noises on this. But then the sound of it changes, presumably as whatever is up there changes tact, beginning to scratch with more force, on a different part of the train. Juno sits up.

“What the fuck?”

Overhead in the top bunk, Rita groans and turns over. She mumbles into her pillow. “Don’t’cha worry about it, Mistah Steel. Just go on back to sleep.”

The sound of scratching intensifies. It is no longer just scratching, but gouging- like whatever owns the claws is trying to pull the train apart only a few cars away from them.

“What is it?” his voice drops to a whisper on instinct.

“It ain’t nothin’ but the wind.”

“Sounds like the wind has a knife, Rita.”

She pushes her face deeper into her pillow. “Ain’t it a good thing we’re in a train, then?”

Juno can’t make himself sleep through this. He’s got to get up. He’s got to talk to someone or shoot something, or at least figure out what it is. 

Vespa is in the hallway already. Her arms are crossed tightly over her chest.

“I hear it too.” Juno offers.

Tight-lipped, she nods. “Damien told me something like this would happen. Their monsters are attracted to warm, moving targets that smell like magic.”

“What a weird fucking thing to have to say.”

Vespa snorts. “I know, I know. I hate our lives, Juno.”

“I feel like we should try to get on the roof and fight it.”

“But?”

“But I’m too tired. I just- I don’t know if I have the energy to care about more ridiculous shit this week. The car’s a Martian. Earth is magical, Rita’s a wizard. The Rita being a wizard thing, that was really the limit of the weird that I can handle today.”

Vespa nods. “Good call. What do you say we find a quiet corner to play some poker and talk each other to sleep?”

They creep through the darkened halls to the library compartment behind the sleeper cars and settle there, with the shutters drawn and the buffer of the paper books around them to dampen the sound. There are several things on the roof, now, clawing away determinedly in several spots. To pass the time, they play a few hands of Rangian Street Poker with a dog-eared deck Vespa claims to have had for longer than she’s had pubic hair, which Juno didn’t need or want to know.   
She beats him like a rug on a clothesline. By the time they are each sleepy enough to take another shot at bed, Juno owes Vespa 21 million creds, his first-born and his pancreas. The scratching has yet to stop, but Juno is getting to the point where he can tune it out.

He comes awake again around 4 a.m. to something attempting to crawl in between the top-sheet and comforter. Because the scratching has gone Juno’s immediate thought is, logically, that the thing has made its way through the train hull and is now attempting to peel Juno out of his wrapper and devour him. He gets in one good whack with the pillow before he realizes it’s just Soup, who continues burrowing away indignantly. Juno relaxes, rolling over towards the wall.

“Your own bed not good enough?” he mumbles.

“I saw a spider over there.” she says, stealing the majority of the covers in a swift tug. “You can go over there if you want. It might be too crowded with two of us.”

Juno pulls back at the covers and manages to retrieve a corner for himself. “I’m ok here.”

Soup pulls the covers again. Her strength is super-human. Juno hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of holding on. “Are you sure? It’s kinda warm in here.”

“Really? ‘Cos I’m chilly just now.” 

Sliding out of the bunk, Juno retrieves a blanket from Soup’s (at a glance, spider-free) and wraps himself up in it, mummy-style, which thwarts Soup’s attempts to steal this one too. She grows still for a few minutes. Juno thinks she has fallen back asleep. 

But then she hits Juno with a real gem of a question: “Where are you guys gonna put me?”

Oh, Lord. Oh wow. She’s gonna hit him with this? While Rita’s asleep and every other sober mind is out of reach, and Juno, marooned on the edge of a mattress she has robbed from him. 

Better to treat her like an adult in this case and just be honest with her. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t know where we’re going to be tomorrow or the day after and I know that’s not good for a kid.”

Soup wipes her sleeve across her eyes. “Don’t I get to decide what’s good for me?”

“Yes. You decided you needed help, right? And I’m trying to help you. I just…I just don’t know if the help you need, the safety, I don’t know if that is with me, or us. We’ve only known each other for about a week and a half.”

“But you said you already loved me.”

Juno freezes up. Stupid little kids with their super-powered hearing. 

“I do.” he says softly. 

“Like a dog. Just ‘cos I wandered up to you an’ Jet, right? Just ‘cos, oh, this thing is helpless, this thing can’t survive without me. Well I can’t. I- maybe I can, I don’t know, but I don’t wanna try, but I don’t wanna be this stupid little dog that you have to just bring all over with you.”

“Not like a dog. Not like a dog, honey.”

He hears her shift. Face the wall. “Then like what?”

“Like…like it’s a duty. Like, I remember what it was like to be your age to be completely helpless against my mom.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“It’s hard. It makes you feel like…well it makes you feel like a lot of things. Mostly like you’re not enough. Like you need to be different. If you were different, everything would be fine. If you were different, she would be nice and treat you like a mom should.”

“And she wouldn’t fight with everybody so much. Or cry at night, in her room.”

“Yeah. Like if you were different, she would be ok, and she would be a good parent, and the only reason she isn’t is because of you. But that’s not true. That’s…the problem is with her. It’s always with her, I promise you.”

“So that’s why?” Soup sounds like she is on the verge of tears. “It’s not me, it’s her? But everything went wrong when I was born. I think. I think she was ok before me.”

“When I was a little bit older than you, there was this building in my home town. They wanted to put another level on it. And because we were a bit lawless out there, the city council just started doing it. They didn’t check or anything. They started to build onto this thing, putting all of this heavy scaffolding and piping and stuff on top of it. One day, the whole thing collapsed inwards. It just split at the sides and fell down on itself. If they’d have just checked, they would have known that the building wasn’t supposed to have that much weight on it. Maybe because it wasn’t strong enough. Maybe because it was never designed to have more weight.”

Soup takes a minute to respond. When she does, the unsplit tears have been supplanted by confusion. “Am I the building, the extra stuff or the city council?”

“You’re the extra stuff, honey. You’re wonderful. You’re perfect. It’s not your fault that the city council didn’t check before they put you up there, and it’s not your fault the building fell in. The extra weight just showed the flaws that were already there. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah…yeah, but it still feels like it’s me. Does that stop? Do I get to stop feeling like…feeling like I’m the problem?”

Juno stares at the ceiling. At the tiny slice of moonlight that has crept in through the shutters and the shadows that sweep through it every now and then.

“I think you will.”

“Do you still feel like you’re a problem, though?”

“I do. But I never had anybody to help me.”

She chews on that for a second. “I’m not you, though. Little you. Little Juno. I got my own stuff, don’t I?”

“You do, honey. Look, I don’t think I can travel backwards in time and save myself by helping you. I just…I just feel like I should try as much as I can because I know what it’s like to be where you are.”

“Except nobody ever helped you.” she finishes. “Huh. Maybe I should live with Arum and Damien an’ their wife.”

“Maybe.”

“They seem nice. An’ there’s three of them. If one of ‘em turns out ta not like me, at least I can try again with the other two.”

Juno tries long and hard to think of a good response to that. A constructive, encouraging response. But he’s got nothing and so they just lay there in a shared cocoon of silence and blankets until Soup’s breathing slows to a sleeper’s pace and Juno can no longer keep his eye open, as troubled as he is sure his dreams will be. 

(Rita)

About twenty minutes after they’re off the train and they’re already under attack. Makes sense. They are near Seattle, after all. Rita’s never been within 30 k’s of Seattle without having an experience that made her fear for her life a little bit, whether that was from paranoia about being in a semi-active volcano basin or from the city’s high of population bearded men who make intense, unbroken eye contact.   
God! Been a long time since she had to worry about this stuff- the bearded men and the other problem. Well, ok, not that she didn’t have to worry about her personal safety on Mars as much as on Earth. On Mars you can usually see the crazy shit coming at you. Just avoid the people that are carrying obvious gun holsters and anybody involved in politics, and you should be fine. With Earth? It’s harder to tell. Earth doesn’t have the courtesy to sign-post its crazy as clearly as Spacer crazy, but hell if Rita isn’t happy to be home anyway.

They come in the smoke. Out of the smoke. 

Kevin leaves them at the train station right by the port, coming out of the conductor’s car long enough to help them move the Carte Blanche from the cargo car to a suspended platform with a towing attachment, and then guide that out of the quiet train station. Rita says goodbye with a side-hug and a silent prayer that she will not have to see anymore of her distant cousins on this trip. Her parents haven’t communicated with her directly since she made the Penumbras aware that she was back on Earth, but she’s betting that they’ll be in Utqiagvik to meet her. Rita’s parents have never liked fighting over the phone.

But it’s not all grim. She’s back home, for Pete’s sake! Well, a few thousand kilometers away from home, but it’s pretty much a straight line from here to the Confederacy. 

This is the season for whales of all types to calf and for the coastal fishing folks to uncover their boats for some spring fishing, so water-traffic really declines. Besides, Seattle and the surrounding boroughs have excellent land transport connections. Nobody’s going to risk the wrath of post-natal whales and squirrely teens brandishing a fishing spear for the first time, not when they can just spend another hour or two on the buses.   
Therefore, nobody’s around to raise the alarm that a local pit has been active, and Rita doesn’t know to worry about the stuff that comes out of pits until that stuff lurches out of the tree-line and tries to grab Guapo.

Like a parent unpinning their child from a car, Vespa has snatched her vent-pug back and given the pit-creature such an almighty kick in the face that it rolls back the way it came, down the steep ridge off the side of the road.

“Did I-” Vespa darts backwards, clutching Guapo upside-down so that his legs pedal in the air. “Did I just body-check a fucking…no…no, there’s no way.”

Yes, way! As the sound of Guapo’s attacker rolling through the underbrush fades, an accomplice pops up out of hiding and looks after its fallen comrade. A thing about the size of a dog, sleek and glossy with feathers, half bird, half snake, and all hunger.

“Is that a velociraptor?” blurts Vespa.

Arum shields his eyes against the watery sun. “A Utahraptor, specifically. Well then, I suppose we better get ready to fight.”

Juno picks Soup up and puts her on the edge of the cargo-platform- not really out of the raptors’ reach, since they can jump and all, but it’s the thought that counts. And then he’s looking at Rita, clearly wondering if he should do the same for her. Rita warns him off with a look; she can get out of the way by herself, thanks very much.

More Utahraptors have gathered at the tree-line. They must have meant to flank them and separate them out, but now that they have realized that this is not just another pack of Earthlings to shred like cheese- this is a whole new kind of animal. A little animal that smells of vacuum and packaged air and doesn’t know enough to be afraid of them.

Silently, Rita takes Guapo out of Vespa’s arms, tosses him over her shoulder like a drooling sack of flour and scales the platform. Soup shuffles over to make room for her. This morning, the kid was all frowns and glowers, but the prospect of watching her guardians battle a pack of dinosaurs has cheered her up.

She grabs Rita’s arm and points. “Look at all those chickens!”

Rita grins. Ok, she forgot that this danger could be fun, too, when you weren’t involved in the fighting. Rita hasn’t fought off a dinosaur in years. When it became apparent that she was always going to be this short, she and her parents decided it was best not to tempt fate. 

“They ain’t chickens, sweetie, they’re-”

“THOSE ARE DINOSAURS!” Juno has purpled, a vein standing out in his temple. He is so mad it looks like his skull is trying to hop out of his face.

“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!” Vespa throws her hands up and puts her back to the dinosaurs, of which there are now eight or nine, staring with menace. “WHAT THE FUCK? WHAT IS THIS PLANET?”

“Aggressive!” Arum has produced four knives from his various pockets. “Get ready to fight! And be careful that you don’t get stuck in them- they don’t look it, but they’re made of oil.”

While the fight erupts below them, Rita kicks her legs, scratches Guapo between the ears and explains the pits and the dinosaurs to Soup. It is difficult to keep the story coherent because Soup keeps breaking in with conjectures and questions.

“So they’re made of crude oil?”

“Eh, kinda?” Rita has to raise her voice over the tennis-player noises Buddy is making from the effort of swinging her broadsword. 

“And the oil was haunted?”

“Maybe? My mama always told it like the dinosaurs climbed outta all the ol’ mines an’ oil wells in the world, an’ some pits that kinda just appeared on their own too-”

“For revenge?”

“I guess so? They sure don’t like humans. They don’t mess with nothin’ but us neither.”

“Does that mean cooking oil is haunted too? Like- if I eat stuff that got cooked in veggie oil, do I have to worry about ghost vegetables coming after me?”

Rita opens her mouth. Then she shuts it. She’d never even considered that possibility.

Soup continues, a decibel higher so she can be heard over the tumbling mess that Juno and a raptor he is just straight up wrestling make as they attempt to gouge each other’s jugulars out. “Because I wouldn’t mind that! It would be kinda cool! I always wondered what the ghost of a corn cob would look like.”

“Damn…” Rita whispers. “Yer right. I mean, my mama always said that the dinosaurs came outta the pits an’ all ‘cos we gouged almost all of ‘em outta the ground an’ put ‘em in machines, or stuck ‘em in museums, and that’s gotta make ya angry. If dinosaurs can come back as oil zombies ‘cos we ill-treated their corpses so much…maybe veggies can too.”

“I think I could win a fight against a ghost tomato. What do you think?”

“Oh, honey, I don’t doubt it!”

Guapo gurgles in agreement.

The raptors’ numbers keep growing. Rita begins to get nervous. The others are slowly being forced back towards the platform, to where Rita, Soup and Guapo are perched like a trio of delicious chicken nuggets. Damien has got his bow out and blinded two or three of them, but the dinosaurs heal quickly, their wounds spouting tar and grease instead of blood, shoving the arrows out of their wounds thirty seconds after they are created. They do not fall. They do not tire. They aren’t scaring off either, even though Ruby has begun just picking them up and tossing them at each other. Boy, is she strong! And she’s making Rita want to go bowling, if they survive this.

Just when Rita is starting to think she’ll have to make a break for it with Soup and the vent-pug, up a tree or something, she hears the war-cry of a dragon trilling over the treetops. It is like hearing a song again that was her favorite in high-school. A swell of nostalgia puts tears in her eyes and has her grinning as a stout grey dragon zooms out of the mists. 

Soup’s mouth drops open. “There’s a dude on that dragon!”

Rita squints. “Oh! There is!”

“Oh, finally! There he is!” Arum stows one of his knives in his cloak and taps Damien on the shoulder, pointing upwards. “Here comes our brother-in-law.”

Without even looking up, Damien lets out a masculine kind of bellow that startles the Earthlings as much as it does the dinosaurs. The man who is indeed strapped into a saddle on the dragon’s back responds in kind. The dragon joins in last, and it is this addition that finally spooks the dinosaurs.   
Arum grabs all three of the Earthlings by the back of their heads and forces them to duck. Seconds later, the dragon’s dive-bombing the dinosaurs, claws first, wings whipping the mist and tar-fumes into a flurry, and all the while the man on dragon-back is brandishing a staff. He wallops the braver raptors away, punting them a good distance as they attempt to jump onto the dragon’s back and peel their rider out of the saddle. Rita is just about blown back into the Carte Blanche’s hull. She tries to shield Soup with her body, protect her from the dust and the shrapnel that’s getting whipped up. Soup pummels her away. She is determined not to miss a second of this insanity.

The raptors begin to retreat the way they came. They hiss and fuss and stagger as Damien’s glowing arrows pop out of their healing wounds, but they are retreating. Landing, the dragon remains on their back-legs with their wings flared. The man on their back raises his staff (a curtain rod, at second glance) and lets out a second bellow.

“That’s right!” he cries. “You get out of here! You won’t eat my brothers-in-law today! Try again tomorrow!”

As the last of the raptor disappears back into the woods, the man lowers his staff/curtain rod and swivels at the waist to grin back at the people he has just rescued. 

“Greetings, Spacers! Shall I take you to our leader? Ha! Sorry, sorry, I’m a father. These terrible jokes just come out of me. Everyone alright?”

“Uh.” says Juno. 

Soup flies past him; Rita didn’t even know she’d gotten up. She skids across the wet grass and stops just beside the man’s leg and the dragon’s flank. Her eyes are enormous.  
Her voice trembles as she asks: “Can I pet your dragon?”

The man looks at his dragon. “Can she pet you? Dampierre says you can pet him if you’re gentle.”

“Uh, honey, maybe don’t-” then Juno shuts his mouth and joins Soup, petting the dragon’s flank.

“Where have you two got to? Hello? Ah, there they are! How are we, lads? Are we ready for space?”

The man, Marc, greets each of his brothers-in-laws with a kiss to the cheek. He doesn’t get off the dragon at any point- because the dragon is a service animal, Rita realizes.

Meanwhile, Vespa has just given up. She lays down where she is and rolls over, facedown in the wet grass. Buddy touches her shoulder and is gently waved off. 

Once Marc has greeted his brothers-in-law and checked that nobody has weeping wounds form the raptors, he is all business. “I just zipped ahead to see if you all needed some help. We’ve got a truck coming that can tow this ship along. Talfryn is just a few kilometers down the road. You all can ride with him. Someone can come with me, if they’d like.”

Juno restrains Soup. “No.”

“Why not? Are you allergic to fun? And let go of me. You got dinosaur tar all over you.”

“Because I just fought them to save us from being eaten by- by vengeful dinosaur ghosts!”

“Just come up with me, ok? I won’t fall off if you’re with me. Unless you fall off, then I’ll probably fall with you.”

“Sounds like a plan to me!” exclaims Marc. 

Before Juno can voice the first of a litany of reasons he’s not going to get on the dragon, Marc has picked Juno up one-handed, by the collar, and popped him on the saddle behind him. Soup scrambles up, cinches her arms around Juno’s waist and whoops for Marc to go. 

“I didn’t agree to this-” and then Juno’s protests fade up into the distance as the dragon takes flight, disappearing quickly into the mist.

Kneeling beside her wife, Buddy begins to massage Vespa’s shoulders. “Would you like to get up now, Vespa, dear?”

“Just drag me by the ankles. I can’t move anymore. This shit has paralyzed me. Dinosaurs. Bud, they got zombie dinosaurs.”

“Yes, I saw. It was quite something, wasn’t it?”

Stepping carefully over Vespa, Rita tugs Ruby’s sleeve. “We gonna be ready for this, do you think?”

“It’s only a half day road-trip, isn’t it? Thank god for public infrastructure.”

“No, I mean to go back. To get the boys.”

Ruby shrugs. “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

Rita hasn’t got her attention. Ruby is completely transfixed by the hole in the mist where the dragon has just gone.  
Oh, that doesn’t bode well.

(Two weeks and five days since the kidnapping/now. Jet)

Everything hurts. Everything but the arm which the Kanagawas repaired, perhaps replaced entirely. Jet cannot tell. There is no way to tell where the repair work on his arm has fused with the flesh that is natural to him, because it all looks natural to him, except that the track-marks are gone. Should that feel like a release? It doesn’t. It doesn’t feel as though Jet has been emancipated from anything in his past, but that someone has reached into him and wiped a few things out.   
Pakak, specifically. Jet knows he is here, with the same preternatural confidence with which he knows when there is a spider somewhere in his room that he has not seen yet. Except where his goal with the spiders is to get away from them as fast as physically possible, he has never wanted to be closer to a person more than he wants to be near to Pakak right now. Just as he is confident that Pakak cannot be more than three or four doors away from this locked room, Jet is sure that Pakak is close to death.

His mother would have called it ‘divine information’; an extension of that ‘intercession’ business that she prayed for all the time, where a human intercession was enabled by transmissions of important information directly from an guardian angel or God. Once, in the worst argument they ever had, he threw that back in her face. He asked her why, if she could attribute every time she’d ever lost her keys and found them again in the same day to God, hadn’t she used that skill to predict Yuka-James’ death and save him from it?   
The argument escalated from there. Frustrated, Kateri Sikuliaq called him faithless. Heart-broken and angry in ways he did not understand, Jet called her things that still make him wince to remember. The argument ended with Kateri shouting up the stairs as he ran up them, that things would be easier if Jet just learned to trust in God, and Jet replying with a threat to burn all of the saints’ icons in the house if she said the ‘G’ word one more time.

Two days later, he ran away from Utqiagvik with Kateri’s ulu in his pocket. Those were the last things they ever said to each other. 

It has only been about two and a half days since he shook off the last of the medical coma. Cecil came back about twenty minutes after the Ruby7 announced herself in Jet’s head and then went completely silent. He had Jet dress in a plain jumpsuit that wasn’t quite a prisoner’s, then had him escorted out of the hospital room to a plainer cell by a handful of heavily armored Dark Matters agents. Parading him rather openly through the windowed catwalks, through the Panopticon so that the prisoners on the ground floors could see him, which, when they realized who they were looking at, prompted a response that was somewhere between concert-goers hearing that the show was cancelled and a hall full of students hearing they had a half-day.   
Somebody’s shoe bounced off the glass. Jet doesn’t know if it was meant as a threat against him or just a general expression of anger at Hoosegow. He does, however, see a few people that he knows down there in the roil, and nods in acknowledgement. 

Since then, Jet has had little to do with his time but worry about his missing, dying friend and do push-ups. He is doing both at the moment. One-handed, on the arm that bore the fatal wound. His eyes are shut so he can float away from this room. Forget where he is and what he’s dealing with. Conserve his mental strength while he tests the limits of the physical. He hasn’t degraded much during his medical coma. In fact, he feels more powerful now than before he went under. What the Kanagawas did to his arm may well have spread throughout his body- imbued him with a weird, unnatural strength, honing what he already has so as to make a more effective tool. 

As to what they’re going to do with him, Jet doesn’t know and doesn’t want to guess. He is an investment. That much is clear. An investment in the war-chest the Kanagawas have been building from cast-offs since the war ended. A terrifying prospect, but Jet doesn’t see much point in dreading it. He is determined he will not be here for long. Certainly not long enough to make himself worth the trouble the Kanagawas have gone to, repairing him, putting fresh blood in his veins and preserving his all-important sobriety.   
There is a dose of non-opioids sitting on the nightstand of his spartan cell. Jet hasn’t taken it. He is in a great deal of pain from what seems to be junk information in his nervous system- obviously, somebody has been messing with the deep tissues. He has felt similar, rootless pains before after an injury that did some major damage to the nerves in his leg and side. It would have disabled him permanently in the left leg had he not had immediate access to some amazing medical care, but God, the recovery was so bad it made Jet wish he’d just let it fester. He couldn’t so much as sit up without prompting a fiery pain from shoulder to ankle that sucked the breath from him and wetted his eyes. 

They have changed his body. If he is lucky, Jet will not have to discover the extent of their changes from Hoosegow. He will be back on the Carte Blanche with Vespa in attendance and the rest of his family clucking in worry and excitement, knowing Rita, who would have traded places with him in an instant if she knew she might get the chance to become a cyborg, or whatever the Kanagawas have tried to make of him. 

Much as his shoulders are aching, Jet prefers a bit of activity and pain to laying still on the bunk (too short for him), unmoving, still pained, and worrying about what is happening to his family right now.   
They are coming for him and Pakak. He knows that much. Whether or not they will come in time to save Pakak before his illness kills him, whether or not there is anything to be done to save him at all…that is anyone’s guess.

A rap at the door. Jet doesn’t answer; they are not asking for his permission to enter, but warning him that they are about to come in.

It’s Cass Kanagawa, dressed in a fashionably ripped prison jumpsuit. Her privileges and responsibilities in Hoosegow are such that Cass might as well still be in the outside world working for her family. 

“You can stop that. You’re buff enough already.” she says. He can feel her eyes travel up and down the length of his body in either jealousy or lust, or both. 

“What is it?”

“They want you to be ready in ten.”

Jet looks over his shoulder at her, pausing in plank position. “For what?”

“Ready for your execution. Are you scared?”

“Scared to die?”

“Scared to ‘die’.” Cass actually puts air-quotes around the last word. Jet hasn’t seen anyone do that in real life before.

Sighing, Jet kneels, and unwraps his other arm from behind his back. “I suppose you’ve brought some blood packs for me to wear?”

Cass grins. She likes him. Again, Jet can’t quite tell if it is a romantic interest or if she is just glad of someone else to talk to- someone she might consider her intellectual, criminal equal. “It’s a lethal injection.”

“Well, they’re not going to put anything into me, I can tell you that much now. I don’t care if it’s colored saline. If they try to put a milligram of anything in my body, I am going to make a mess of their set.”

“They’ve got a prosthetic skin patch to put on you. I wouldn’t worry about it. All you have to do is look stoical for a few moments and then pretend to die. That’s not so bad, right?”

“It’s gonna be an emergency newsblast, you know. They’re not advertising this. Your death is gonna freeze the whole galaxy in the middle of a work day. Doesn’t that make you feel something? Maybe not special, but-”

“Is that all?”

“What?”

“Is that all you have to tell me?”

“I mean, it’s not a speech, but I think it’s pretty significant-”

“Unless you have anything to tell me that pertains to seeing my friend, we have nothing else to discuss.”

Her grin changes to a scowl. “You’re a real hard-ass, you know that?”

“I am aware. Please leave me.”

“Alright, alright. Hey, Jet, one more thing. Do you believe in God?”

Jet stares at her. She stares back, serious.

“Yes.” says Jet. “Most of the time.”

“Maybe pray, then. A little bird told me that your fake death might get interrupted by a miracle, if you know what I mean.”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“Well, look, they’re putting you in an open-air space, is all I’m saying. Maybe if you look up and ask nicely, you’ll see an angel swooping down to save you.”

Jet gets up and shuts the door on Cass’s face. 

Ok, now he is a little bit afraid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of my aunts is a medical doctor. I once complained about hearing a noise like a coke being shaken up in my neck, and she told me I was hearing my own bodily fluids which is not a thing that most people can do. 
> 
> Here’s some emotional stuff. Here’s some bonding. Here’s some frank discussions of childhood trauma. Here’s undead dinosaurs. Will I ever settle on a consistent brand of storytelling or will I just keep jerking the steering wheel of this story-bus that’s going along a narrow mountain road, and enjoying the screams of the passengers in the back?


	20. The End, Part one: It’s all just peanut butter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well that was a bit longer a hiatus than I planned. Sorry y'all, I'm an English tutor and apparently all of my students have major essays they were hiding from me until the last moment. I like to tell them that they're the reasons I don't think I'll have children of my own.
> 
> Trigger warnings: Incarceration, extensive mentions of prison execution, execution by lethal injection, asexual character’s friend being mistaken for a love interest, light torture, torture that resembles nerve pain, mass incarceration in a large facility, implied torture, mentions of incinerating bodies, mentions of death/murder, character with chronic illness, mentions of hospitalisation, mentions of cystic disease, mentions of being on medicinal adrenaline, (Diamond) abuser describing former relationship with abusee that puts the blame onto the latter, abuser using crude (non-graphic) language, fingernails again, fingernails used as a weapon (Nureyev), scene where character is made to play-act own execution, needles (no injection)
> 
> Suggested listening: 'Land of the Free’, by The Killers

(Hyperion City, now)

On the day of the Unnatural Disaster’s execution, Hyperion City is slow to stir. An unseasonable heatwave has crushed the city, making every surface that isn’t metal clammy to the touch. The direct sunlight is so punishing that many who woke up with a plan to attend the execution in person need only one glance outdoors to decide that watching the stream is just as good. The event has shut the city down in the same way a public holiday or a bad dust storm would: schools, banks, the markets, chain and independent stores alike, basically everything but the hospitals and emergency responders. The Unnatural Disaster has once again stopped up the workings of a major city, this time without even lifting a finger say, to dump straight cocaine into the atmospheric regulators, or stealing a beloved planetary satellite.  
Even the roads in and out of the city are closed. In part, this was a pre-emptive move that the unexpectedly on-the-ball Mayor Mercury made, in recognition that news of the Unnatural’s public appearance and summary execution would draw an incredible number of people to the city. Day-trippers from neighboring cities and tourists alike. A tourist in Hyperion City? Literally, no infrastructure for them.

People don’t even use hotels here, they just rent cheap apartments or stay with family and friends. Being the (perhaps justifiably) suspicious people Hypers are, the possibility that these nosy day-trippers would find shelter in the city was remote, laughable and ultimately too risky to even entertain. It was either let people flood the city and sleep in the sewers alongside the survivors of O’Flaherty’s rabbit purge, or close the borders and tell people to watch it from the comfort of their own homes, and let the locals weather this strange time without turning it into some kind of tourist thing.

Mayor Mercury was instrumental in ensuring that the latter plan was put into effect, and in suspending every service without which the city could function. However slim the possibility may be, there is a chance that the Unnatural Disaster could slip his chains and go on a rampage through the city.  
Mick is prepared for that eventuality. Prepared, in that he knows that Cecil Kanagawa has installed some kind of mechanism in the Unnatural’s arm to prevent him from turning on his handlers, and Mick has every intention of stealing whatever controls it. He figures, should the opportunity for an escape present itself, it is best for everybody if the Unnatural gets away and returns to his remote corner of the galaxy. Mick has only caught a few glimpses of the Unnatural since he regained consciousness and never spoke to him, but he is fairly sure that the Unnatural wants to be off of Mars as much as Mick wants him to be. Working on the Ruby7, braiding his hair, healing from his medical coma with cat naps in the sun. As long as he isn’t working as a Kanagawa retainer.

Now, Mick hasn’t got much of a plan except for staying close and watching for an opening. Min has told him to be there and seemed a bit surprised when he accepted. She went as far as asking if Mick would make some sort of address to the people of Hyperion to reassure them that this was the beginning of a wholesome, healthy partnership between Hyperion City’s authorities and the Kanagawas. Mick told her not to push her luck.  
All he has to do- all he wants to do is stand back there with his mouth shut, trying not to make eye-contact with Sasha and praying that Juno is one of the handful of people who will not be tuned into the execution today. 

What will they do, though, if Mick helps the Unnatural? Will Min shoot him in front of the people that just put him into office? Will Sasha hold him back? Will Hyperion City disavow him as the newest model in a great tradition of corrupt mayors? 

God. Mick really needs to call Juno back to talk some of these things over. As soon as the execution is finished, he will call Juno back.

Diamond has got the car idling in the garage, bundled up against the powerful air conditioning. They were supposed to be at Hoosegow ten minutes ago, but Mick is distracted this morning. He misplaced his keycard with all of the important security clearances and then, after finding that, misplaced his comms, and then after finding that had to spend another few minutes agonizing over whether or not to wear the little side-arm that all mayors are required to carry for personal protection. Or opportunistic assassinations. Whichever one comes up first.

Mick spent a good five minutes paralyzed in front of the bathroom mirror. His own reflection terrified him. A plastic beast slumbering in the crook of his ribs and armpit. The horrible lightness of it, at once negligible and urgent, the slight dig of its harness on his bare forearms when his arms are at his sides. 

Mick compromises. He brings the gun. But he covers it and himself with a short jacket, in spite of the heat, so powerful that sweat beads his brow during the short walk from the front door to the garage.

Diamond glances at him in the rear-view mirror. Until last week, Mick was sitting beside them in the passenger seat. But they said they would feel more comfortable if Mick was in the backseat.  
Apparently, it’s harder to shoot out and easier for Mick to take cover because there’s all those seats to crawl underneath. Mick thinks that Diamond just doesn’t want to look at him. That’s fine by Mick. Permission to put some distance between them without making it awkward.

“You should change, sir. It’s already 42 degrees outside.”

Mick tugs the sleeves down to cover his wrists. “Nice and chilly in here though, isn’t it? I think this car has got better AC than all the apartments I’ve ever lived in.”

The car moves down the driveway. The engine hardly whispers, and it is only the world moving past the windows that tells Mick they have started to drive at all.

“You’ll get heat-stroke out there today, sir.”

“Well, if you see me start to fade, Diamond, you can aim me so I fall into the Unnatural Disaster’s lap. How’s that sound? I think that meme from last week is getting tired. We should give the people some fresh material.”

Diamond is clearly not in the mood to talk. They are on edge.

So of course Mick talks all the way to Hoosegow, describing each and every meme template that has been made out of his pratfalls (stumbling so hard on the steps of city hall that he lost a shoe and briefly reenacted Cinderella with a passing councilperson), oblivious moments (clipping his microphone upside down at 10/12 press conferences so far), diplomatic bungles ( responding to the Surgeon General’s attempt at a handshake with a fist bump) and that one clip of him finishing a footlong in three bites in the back of a public health briefing, which has been made into a reaction gif.

By the time they arrive at Hoosegow, a small but pronounced vein pulses on Diamond’s throat. 

In the next borough over, Omar Khan is cooking an enormous quantity of pasta for an equally enormous quantity of children.  
Since he has got to get to Hoosegow before the execution anyway, Omar volunteered to get the kids in motion so that Noor would have a slightly more manageable audience when she did get up. All seven of them are at home today. Wisely, the mayor has shut down the schools and banks and everything else that can be shut down without costing lives or major utilities. Omar could kill him for it. Yes, Mayor Mercury is right to be cautious when there is a possibility that the Unnatural will escape and wreak havoc on the city. At the same time, it would make little difference to his children if, say, the Unnatural did take their school hostage and dump his pocket-cocaine into the vents. His kids already act like they’re on violent stimulants- maybe the real thing would mellow them the fuck out. 

“No I won’t.” Omar says, before one-of-seven can finish asking if he’ll take her with him.

“Why?”  
At thirteen, one-of-seven is both the eldest and the one who reminds Omar the most of himself. Which is to say, curious, engaged and slightly insufferable. 

One-of-seven has brought seven-of-seven from her crib and planted her in a high chair for the morning feed. “Are you to be seen ashamed with me? Because you act like you’re ashamed of me ever since I got my nose piercing.”

“The nose piercing that I did for you?”

“Do you begrudge me my bodily autonomy?”

“No! And good vocabulary! Where did you hear those words from?”

“I read- ok guys, move, or Baba’s gonna get boiling water all over you!”

Several of the toddlers and younger kids scuttle obediently out of the way as Omar strains the pasta in the sink. Leaving one-of-seven to plate it up for her siblings, Omar creeps back into the bedroom and stuffs himself into his uniform. Five minutes later, he emerges, doing up his last button, and finds that three and two-of-seven are wrestling across the floor, six-of-seven is wearing most of his breakfast pasta and the TV is turned to a channel that Omar has restricted to everybody under eleven, which includes five of the kids.  
Cecil Kanagawa’s face grins out from the corner of the kitchen: a re-run of his excavation special. Educational, Omar’s ass. Half of that programme was just watching Cecil’s Earthling body-guard hoist him out of ancient traps and the other half was plugs for violent shows on the age-restricted channels that the younger kids are always begging to see. 

Separating the two on the floor with his foot and a vague threat to take away their shared comms, Omar grimaces up at Cecil, who grimaces down. The re-run interrupted by a pop-up screen and a short message, delivered in the monotone of a Kanagawa intern, reminding everyone of the time, date and location of the Unnatural’s Execution.

“Where’s the remote?”

One-of-seven points to three-of-seven, who has got it clenched between their teeth. Omar gestures for it.

“Can I come, Baba?” asks three-of-seven.

“No. Stop pinching your brother.”

“But she gets to go!” screeches two-of-seven, pointing at his oldest sister.

“No she doesn’t!” Omar picks up five-of-seven and puts her in a chair at the table. “Here, honey, get started on your breakfast. Nobody gets to go to the execution except for me and I don’t even want to go! I don’t want to look at that nasty man’s nasty little man face for any longer than I’m already gonna have to, so can we turn the dang TV off? You guys aren’t even allowed to watch this channel!”

Three-of-seven points at two-of-seven. “He did it! I just wanted to watch cartoons.”

“Hey!” two-of-seven punches them in the arm and they’re off again, cleaving to each other like a pair of angry tom-cats.

Perhaps annoyed that she does not yet have the upper-body strength to join in, seven-of-seven seizes a handful of pasta and flings it at her siblings. There is a squall of indignation as she gets both of them in the face.

Omar massages his temples and surrenders the remote to his eldest. “Here, put on a nature documentary.” And then, under his breath. “If the Kanagawas want real weapon of mass destruction, I got seven in my damn kitchen.”

A toddler wraps around his leg. Five-of-seven peers up at him. “What you say, Baba?”

“I said I love you very much.”

A couple blocks and a sharp right turn down from the Khans’ apartment block is a decidedly more decrepit high-rise. It leans into its neighbor like an old man leaning on a bar-top, pocked with cracks and sunken windows that mean the eastern half of the building can’t close their windows fully. Sasha Wire lives on the eleventh floor and can still feel the slope in the floors. Sasha’s salary and position in her business are such that she could be Mick’s neighbor again; she seriously considered moving into the mansion beside his, if only to keep a closer eye on him. Mick was proving to be more problematic in the mayoral office than she gave him credit for. 

But when Sasha brought it up to her wife, Alessandra laughed. “Move into a mansion? Are you trying to make me into a class traitor?”  
And so Alessandra’s bachelorette apartment has become the marriage home.

Their marriage has been a strange one, riddled by protracted absences as Sasha’s job carried her to strange, sinister corners of the galaxy. The highly classified nature of her missions meant that Sasha couldn’t even tell her wife where she was going- she had to blur the backgrounds on their chats, on the occasion that they could both chip out a slot in their respective schedules. Sometimes it felt like they had never reunited. Sometimes, it felt to Sasha as if she and her wife were still stranded in twinned foxholes and yelling to each other over the sounds of shelling.  
Even when she is home living with Alessandra, eating with Alessandra, listening to Alessandra’s CPAP machine, this feeling ambushes Sasha. How can she consider herself truly ‘with’ the woman she loves if Sasha is constantly pulled away from her, physically for work, and mentally by the knowledge that she can never be fully honest with Alessandra.

“All marriages have secrets,” her father said, when she expressed this to him. “Your baba still thinks I like smooth peanut butter and we’ve been together for fifty years.”

“This is a little deeper than the smooth vs crunchy peanut butter debate.”

“Let me finish, baby. Having secrets in marriages isn’t always a good thing. Privacy, independence, of course, always, but secrets makes space for lies, and lies makes space for dishonesty and cruelty. I regret lying to your baba. That I’ve been able to make him believe that smooth peanut butter is fine for me when really, God, baby, it’s the worst thing in the universe…it makes me afraid of what else I might be capable of sneaking past him. You get used to dishonesty if you practice too many white lies, and white lies follow you. It’s never just me and your baba, you know? It’s me, your baba, and smooth peanut butter, because I have to carry the burden of my lie everywhere we go, and your baba knows we two are never alone. I think he thinks I’m cheating on him or something.”

“Dad! Tell him about the fucking peanut butter!”

“Hey, hey! I’m the one giving the lecture here, you, you close that smart mouth and listen up. Sasha, you may think that your undermining the Martian state and my lying about peanut butter are different things, but mark my words, baby girl, they are the same. They are achieved and maintained by the same patterns of destructive behavior. They are spores from the same mold and they’ll rot your marriage from the inside out if you don’t take care. You’ll have to decide whether you want to be with Alessandra or if you want to be with peanut butter.”

“You mean Dark Matters?”

“Oh, it’s all peanut butter in the end.”

Alessandra will be in the crowd today. The scale of the event is such that the HCPD has bolstered its ranks with members of local security agencies or freelancers with good records like Alessandra. For the record, Alessandra thinks it’s a shitty idea. Everybody knows the execution is just a formality to put the public and governmental institutions at ease, so that the Unnatural can be used later on.  
Sure, Saturn might complain, they might raise a fuss about their missing ring, but when the Unnatural Disaster has been publicly ‘killed’ they can’t say much more without discrediting themselves as conspiracy theorists. In a few hours, the Unnatural Disaster will have milligrams of saline squirted into his veins, play dead for as long as it takes to get his big Earthling body on a stretcher. Then Kanagawas will be able to use him at their discretion. 

And it is Sasha’s job to make sure this all goes smoothly.

“What about the other one?”

“Huh?”

Alessandra’s head pops around the bathroom door. She is in the process of putting on her 50 SPF foundation, so half of her face is smoothed into agelessness while the other half is still marked from the mask of her CPAP machine.  
“I said what about the other one? The guy whose name you don’t know.”

Sasha attempts to straighten her tie. “We know some of his names. Titanius Minthe, Rex Glass, Castro Rorschach and I’ve got my suspicions about the identity of that anonymous Buddicia Aurinko put on her new crew.”

“What, you think Rex Glass works for an OG like Buddy? I don’t think so.”

Sasha joins her wife in the bathroom. Alessandra has gotten very close to the mirror- so close that the eyelashes she has already done are leaving black streaks on the glass.  
The tip of Alessandra’s nose is flattened against the glass as she attempts to get the left wing of mascara equal to the right.  
“Buddicia Aurinko is a discriminating employer. Back when she had that bar in the Cerberus Province, she wouldn’t even let you drink there if she didn’t have your references.”

Sasha frowns. “And you know this because?”

“I got my contacts. Separate from your contacts.”

One of the golden rules of their marriage: work stays at work, home stays at home. They don’t swap contacts or information or anything about their jobs, even though Sasha has sometimes suspected that they were working on different sides of the same issue. 

“Besides, I think Aurinko’s wife has some psychosis and paranoia issues. No way would she let a stranger into her team.”

“Vespa Ai Ilkay? I thought she fell off a building.”

“Yeah, she did. She must have bounced.” Gathering up her braids in one hand, Sasha holds her wife’s hair back so she doesn’t glue stray hairs to her mouth with chapstick. “Anyway, back to whoever he is, your traitor, you’re not going to have to leave the planet to move him, right?”

“No. Someone is coming from off-planet to get him today. I guess Min finally got nervous about having the Unnatural and Glass so close together.”

“Who are they to each other anyway? I heard someone say that Glass was in love with the Unnatural. In that case, somebody better tell him he’s barking up the wrong tree.”

“No, it’s not romantic. I think it’s…I don’t know, I mean, if they were both Earthlings then I’d say they were brothers. Maybe the Unnatural got adopted into whatever kind of crime ring raised Glass.”

Alessandra grins. “A pack of crime wolves.”

“Honestly? He bites. He got a chunk of Cecil’s hand the other day. It was hard work to not laugh at the little weasel getting bitten by another weasel.”

They laugh together. And as they finish, Sasha feels something else coming on. Something that tickles her throat like a laugh but definitely isn’t because, as it gets closer, her throat closes up, her eyes mist, her hands tremble. A confession climbs to the tip of her tongue and sways there.

Sasha doesn’t want to do this. She doesn’t want to pretend to kill a man and dispatch another to finish out the remainders of his life in pain, at the mercies of Rauho Noorssen, who is famous for not showing much in the way of it.  
If she says this, right now, Sasha knows that Alessandra will act on it. All she has to do is cave, admit that Dark Matters has shaped her into a form she no longer recognizes nor wants, and Alessandra will take her away. As far as is necessary for Sasha to be her own person again. 

They can drop everything and go. Take on new names and get to know each other again, as women, as wives, as people who fell in love during war and might now have the chance to affirm that love in peace.

“There!” Alessandra throws her arm around Sasha. “Finished. Ready to take on the world.”

With an effort, Sasha swallows. “Your shirt, babe. Button up your shirt.”

And finally, up on the hills where the mansions perch and float, Min Kanagawa sweats in a facility built in the caldera of a dead volcano. The heat of the day has combined with the heat of many large, unwieldly bodies with humid skins indoors to make a sauna-like atmosphere that had Min rolling up the sleeves of her pantsuit and unbuttoning the chest as far as she could go without flashing the staff. Not that the staff have made any attempts at modesty- they have long since dropped the lab coats and professional attire, going about in briefs and bralettes, which is a pretty good indication of how things are going in this late stage of the project. 

“So what I’m hearing is that we’re going to lose all of them.”

A technician fans themself with a thick sheaf of cardiograms. “We will, over the years. Some of them are dealing with the transformation better than others. The one whose changes are still surface are going to last longer. The ones who are fully changed aren’t going to make it to the end of the year if we can’t figure out some way to keep them calm without sedation.”

Min scowls. “What if we up the doses?”

“Their metabolisms can’t handle it. A change like that wreaks all kinds of hell on the body to begin with. Frankly, ma’am, we’re lucky that we’ve got survivors to work with at all. The shock of the transformation should have killed all of them.”

“So what are we supposed to do with them?”

Min gestures to the factory floor that sprawls out in front of them. Last year, this was a hangar where Dark Matters and Mins’ own personal militia were upgrading and combining their fleets. It is a stroke that this place was designed to take advantage of the high ceilings and the vertical space. It is also a stroke of luck, in a perverse way, that 22% of the transfigured settlers died in the caravan to Mars, and then another 5% in the shock of being shaken out of their containment cells, many of which had become too small for their bodies. Those that were not fully Martian when they went into the containment units came out completely alien.  
Those that were human when they were ushered aboard into ships began to lose their humanity within the first few hours. Most of them were locked in holding cells and when they ran out of those, bathrooms, closets, and a few of the larger ships began sticking them in life-boats in the hope that there wouldn’t be an emergency that required them. 

In the end, only a handful of children and teenagers who were too young to have started on the supplement made it out without side-effects. All up, there are less than twenty of the cultists’ children, which is manageable. Min has relocated more children at much shorter notice. One or two of the teenagers proved themselves mouthy in a way that would be problematic if they were placed with another family, and so have gone into the juvenile wing of Hoosegow. They’ll figure out sooner or later that it is in their interest to keep mouths shut and heads down. By that time, Min may have a use for them. The Unnatural Disaster seems like he would be good with children and young people. Maybe he’ll want an apprentice once he’s settled.

Well, either way, Min has got a mess. A couple kilometers square of a mess corralled into a maze of pipes and tubes and testing equipment. The bigger specimens can be moved by the use of a system of harnesses and pulleys built into the high ceiling- hoisted up like mountain climbers in safety ropes, they swing about morosely and glower at Min and the scientists if they do have eyes. This is also how the dead specimens are moved out to the morgue that the morticians jury-rigged out of a level space and a lot of ice-blocks, and then a few plastic tarps and privacy partitions so the live Martian-settlers only have to hear the bodies if their former neighbors being cut to pieces. Not see it happen. 

“What are supposed to do with them?” Min repeats. “One-hundred and sixteen of them, four or six tones apiece. If they die at the rate they’re going right now, we’re going to have almost 500 tons of flesh that’s already decomposing on their damn bones because they’ve all got skin rashes. What do you propose we do with that much corpse?”

A lot of grunts and shrugs. One of the technicians stoops and wipes their forehead on the hem of their boxers. The pace and nature of the work has really worn on the technicians, the scientists and the morticians that Min keeps on her bankroll. They are used to disposing of bodies quickly or producing modest batches of designer drugs. Handling a bunch of traumatized, transfigured Martians was not on the cards. Min hasn’t even bothered attempting to establish any kind of system of communication between the Martians and the staff assigned to them; the Martians know less about their new bodies than anyone.

“What about that hole Cecil uses for the dead CamermenTM?” says the boxers-wiper.

“What about it?”

She shrugs. “We could try putting a few of them in there?”

“No!” Min snaps. “Look, these Martians are a finite resource! We lost the only living one we had. Those other bodies, we’ve already gotten everything we could out of them.”

“Well these aren’t much better.” says another tech- this one is hijabi, and so has remained in an ordinary outfit to preserve her modesty. The heat has put bags under her eyes and a subtle, unmistakable bloodlust in her eyes. “The supplement was derived from those bodies…those templates. If our research was ever going to advance, it was going to have to be with the living one. But we haven’t got access to them anymore.”

A scream. A wet, sloshy scream that sounds more like something fat falling into a filled bathtub than an exclamation of pain, but that is what it is. Those noises are frequent to the point of becoming white-noise in here. Incidentally, also the reason that Cecil is banned from coming near the settlers. The noise has never failed to make him belly-laugh and it annoys the hell out of the techs, who are just trying to get through the day.

Min raises her voice over the scream. “Then keep one of these alive!”

“There’s no point! They’re genetic clones!”

“What?”

“I said-”

“I heard you! What does that mean?”

A few of the techs exchange glances. The one that is still wearing shoes suddenly becomes very interested in his shoelaces. 

Fanning themselves ever more urgently with the cardiograms, the first tech speaks up. “We just confirmed it this morning. We weren’t sure if we knew what we were looking at because sequencing Martian DNA is a new thing, still, but…but now we’re sure. That’s the reason we called you down here, ma’am. They’re genetic clones. Each and every one of them is identical to each other.”

Min blinks. “Ok. I’ll ask again, what does that mean?”

“It means there is nothing new to learn. We can’t learn anything from these specimens that we didn’t already know from the originals, who were identical too.” says the hijabi tech. 

“Nothing new.”

“No.”

“Now, how is it possible? That they’re all identical Martians?”

The tech with the cardiograms shrugs. “We can’t know for sure, ma’am, but I’m thinking that it’s because this control group’s serum was derived from the amniotic fluid in the tanks of those four specimens. I think they must not have been corpses, ma’am. I think they were something closer to…to tissue cultures.”

“The kind hospitals grow for skin grafts,” supplies the boxers-wiper. “Except they were dead tissue, sort of…well, inactive tissue, which is functionally dead. Does that make sense?”

“Not a goddamned bit of it. So you’re telling me that the inferior serum we got from those four tubes…that’s all we’ve got to work with? What about the samples of the live one’s blood?”

Another round of grunts and shrugs, punctuated by the splashing screams.

“Our supplies are limited-”

“-adjust the formula of the drug synthesized by the specimens in the tube-”

“-insufficient stores of the living, active Martian’s blood-”

“So what I’m hearing is that we have an expensive zoo.”

They all fall silent. The one wearing shoes becomes interested in them again.

Min is not as angry as she thought she might be. A part of her felt that the clean-up operation was futile anyway. They would have been better off evacuating the transfigured settlers into space and letting them form a grotesque flotilla to terrorize the shipping lanes. This curemother thing was always Croesus’s initiative, which is why he allowed a cousin and her wife to sort of take over leadership of the Wellness Centre- trust him to keep things in the family. The only way to ensure competence was to use Kanagawas. By the time Min secured herself a spot in the family this whole Platonium business was only about six months old. Had they married for love, had she been more certain of her sway over Croesus in those early days, she would have talked him out of it on the spot.  
Something about the situation felt like an incredible vanity from the beginning. She met the project leaders only once and disliked them with that intense, instant dislike she reserves only for people whom she can tell are attempting to carve out fiefdoms for themselves. At a glance, she could guess it was going to get out of control. That Kayrrine and the others would turn authoritarian, over or under-medicate, murder each other and possibly destroy The Platonium to keep their secret.

By the time Croesus was taken care of it was far too late for Min to interrupt the project without also pissing off a litany of investors, who had been won over by Croesus’s misplaced confidence and results that seemed to guarantee success. Min held her doubts and her tongue. She knew this would be a costly mess sooner or later, but she wasn’t about to risk business and contacts over it.  
Eight-ish years after the cursed project’s commencement, Min has got the equivalent of a factory farm’s livestock in useless, expensive Martian flesh, a crater in the settler belt where The Platonium used to be, a lot of displaced folks with wealthy contacts and bad tempers, and worst of all, a missing asset. 

Goddamn Croesus. He just couldn’t resist the power-play. He just couldn’t turn his back on the temptation of immortality and whatever else it was he thought the Martians’ bodies might offer up, if only they were cut deeply enough.

“Are there still cuttings going on?”

“Yes ma’am. We’re collecting our samples according to your schedule.”

“Well, scrap it.”

“Scrap it?”

Min starts up the stairs, towards the surface. “Scrap it. We’re pulling the plug on this. I don’t want to lose another dollar on this ego-trip. Have the morticians start looking for a place to dump them, because I don’t even want to think about the fat and grease flood we’d have if we tried to fit all of those things in the incinerators. Call in the clean up crews. Go home. You’re all taking a few days paid vacation, until I figure out what our next move is. I’ve got to talk to our investors and partners. I’ve got to talk to Noorssen and see what his people’s next move is. I’ve got to bribe La Charladora, I’ve got to figure out which of my contacts are turning traitor because of this goddamned Unnatural business, I’ve got to assemble a team to track down the living Martian, I’ve got to get Rex Glass packed up and ready to go, and- what time is it?”

“Nine thirty-two.”

“I’ve got to execute the Unnatural Disaster at noon.” with disgust, Min looks down at sweaty self. “And now I’ve got to change my fucking clothes. Goddammit. Just- just get these useless whales out of my hangar and please, god, get the climate under control.”

(Now, Jet)

Cecil found him in the moment after Cassandra had left him to mentally prepare and before the prison escort came to move him to his fake execution. The more time Jet was forced to spend in Cecil’s company, the more certain Jet became that the Devil is real and roaming the world in the skin of this nasty little velvet-wearing man. 

“Jet. Jet, look at me.”

Jet looked at him. Cecil’s mouth quirked up in the corner, and then there was a breath-taking wave of pain in his arm. The reconstructed arm. It was as if he could feel his nerves snarling and tearing, as if his arm was made of straw and cobwebs and being pulled apart. And while Jet was brought to his knees by this inexplicable, incredible pain, Cecil was talking.

“See, I know you’re a clever man. A strong man. You could overpower me easily and then weaponize me against my Juno and the other CameramenTM, swing me like a bat…so I’ve put a countermeasure in your arm. That hurts, doesn’t it?”

The pain abated. Jet drew in a deep breath and remained where he was, bowed to the ground.

“I asked you a question.”

It came back, worse. Jet doubled over himself and gritted his teeth so he wouldn’t bite through his own tongue. A snake made of flame wrapped around him from wrist to shoulder. Teeth sunk inside of him. Even though the spots weren’t there anymore, the abused, weakened veins ripped out and replaced, Jet could swear it hurt the most in the places where he used to shoot up. 

“Answer the question-”

“Yes!”

Gone again. Jet rolled onto his side, curling up around the arm that burned him. There wasn’t so much as a bruise- not even a hair standing on end.

“Ok, so, now you know what it’s going to feel like if you do anything you do anything out of sorts. Even blinking funny. I think I’m being nice, by the way. I could have put one of these in your friend- well, actually, the next shock to his system is going to send him to God, so it’s a good thing I didn’t, and anyway, he isn’t our problem anymore.”

“What did you say?”

Cecil was enjoying himself, clearly, but the CamermanTM that he called Juno was tugging on his sleeve, apparently reminding him of a schedule that he needed to keep. “I said he’s not our problem anymore. Somebody’s coming to get him, right after we kill you.”

Jet didn’t know what to do. Jet didn’t know if there was anything to do, so he just laid star-fished on the ground and waited for the escort to come. 

Ruby was coming. Is coming. Ruby is coming. Apparently? Jet isn’t sure whether that was an elaborate and well-timed hallucination or real. The former seems the most likely option, given that he hasn’t had another communication since the first. And, you know, didn’t know that telepathy was a thing that could be done outside of Rita’s sci-fi pulps. 

As the escort arrives, puts him into two pairs of heavy-duty cuffs (his wrists only just fit into them), and guide him outside, Jet makes a real effort not to stare out of the windows at the sunburned skyline beyond. Surely it will be noticed if Ruby7’s green self comes bombing out of nowhere. She? She will have to be in a disguise of some sort, or it is unlikely she would ever make it across the border. Is she alone? If not, who is with her? Does whoever is with her know that Jet and Pakak are in the same place? Do they know that Pakak is about to be whisked away to an unknown corner of the galaxy?  
Does anybody know anything? Or did they all die and leave Jet and Pakak to kind of drift around in the current?

“Hey!”

Jet looks up. The mayor, Juno’s friend, leans dangerously over a railing to shout down from the lobby. The immense hand on the back of his kurta has to belong to his Earthling bodyguard.

“Yes?”

Mick Mercury is two stories above and yelling through a laser-proofed energy shield. Yet, the regret is plain in his voice.  
“I’m sorry about how this turned out.”

Jet is not sure what to say to that. How does one react to the head of a state, the state that is about to stage one’s execution, dangling over a railing to yell apologies?

“I am sure it will all work out.”  
That should do.

“Wish I had your confidence- hey!” Mick turns and snaps at the owner of the hand on his collar. “I’m not finished…well they can wait for me, can’t they? Like I was saying. I wish I had your confidence. And I wish I could have made them treat you better.”

Jet shrugs. “I feel compelled to point out that I am a mass-murderer.”

“Yeah, well, not here. Besides, we all did things in our 20s that we regret now. See you at the gallows!”

He disappears with a wave that is a bit too cheery for the circumstances. Weird guy.

As Jet is turned towards the back-exit and the route to his execution grounds, Jet wishes Mick luck. At no point does it occur to Jet to wish for some luck for himself. All he can think about is how much his reconstructed arm still aches from Cecil’s punishment. 

(Now, Utqiagvik)

The atmosphere in the community center shouldn’t be festive, but it is. The family drama that continues to unspool in front of Utqiagvik cannot be ignored. Therefore, it must be participated in, and Utqiagvik has defaulted to treating Jetffrey Sikuliaq’s (probably fake) execution like the Native Olympics have come early.  
Most of the town has piled into the community center and packed in around the tables, booths and chairs, a few of the kids reclining on the pool table, and Pastor Nana has got behind the bar and up onto a keg for a better view of the TV. Today, it is turned onto the one Spacer channel that has a signal strong enough to reach them: the Kanagawas. The TV is usually turned to Animal Planet, because the guy who runs the community center firmly opposes televised violence unless it is committed by animals against other animals. Nor will he hear arguments that humans are animals and therefore the teenagers should be heard when they say they want to watch ‘Point Break’ in the lobby. Today is an exception.

Squeezed into a booth with Marc, Talfryn, Emanoraq and her niece, Rilla is already nervous. Not for her husbands who are attached to the rescue party. They have survived worse than a jaunt up to Mars to pinch an intergalactic criminal out of the clutches of a space-mafia family. Arum and Damien will take care of each other.  
Rilla is nervous for Utqiagvik- for Emanoraq and Yuka who, since Arcady’s stroke, are the only members of Jet’s remaining family. Whether or not Emanoraq has forgiven Jet for being a murderous idiot, it would be terrible for her to watch a third sibling die. 

Rilla can’t imagine the kind of pain that would drive a sixteen-year-old child from his home, let alone an Earthling from the warm, socialist bosom of his planet into the radiation-soaked rampage of capitalism that passes for Spacer society. Leaving her husbands in Thai for two months of every year is hard enough. Rilla wouldn’t do it except that Utqiagvik has the planet’s best resources for her work with prosthetic limbs and lab-replicated tissue cultures, and she has come to love the place that hosts her during the summer months. It helps that her brothers, Marc and Talfryn, have settled down and made families for themselves- Marc with his wife and kid, and Talfryn, with his QPR and an involvement in seal rescue that could be argued to provide him with surrogate children.  
She has built up an image of Jet in her head, described by the stories of his rambunctious childhood, tortured teenage years and the path of bloody wreckage he has left behind him ever since he left. Being that Emanoraq doesn’t have any photos of him around the house where he is not also a slightly undersized baby in swaddling, Rilla’s imagination has run free until now.

She has to admit, she is a little bit disappointed by the reality. “He’s short.”

Jet Sikuliaq’s appearance on the steps of Hoosegow’s amphitheater prompts a small riot. Many people stand up sharply enough to knock over their chairs. Others slap their hands on the table, which quickly harmonizes into a thunderous rhythm, like a herd of something equine and enormous is charging down the main street. 

Yuka startles with excitement. Her bony teenager knee drives into Rilla’s ribs.

“LOOK AT THOSE BICEPS!” bellows Nana, the pastor who is so old that her congregation are genuinely afraid that each of her Sunday masses may be the last she says. “THAT’S THE WAY! 100% UTQIAGVIK BEEF!”

“Sit down!” yells someone else, probably one of the altar boys. “You’re gonna give yourself an aneurysm!” 

“We don’t even have cows up here!” 

Yet someone else is laughing- a lot of them are laughing, actually, in the fond ways of uncles and aunties who have cornered a favorite nibling at a family gathering and are interrogating them about career prospects.

“He looks good!” yells Talfryn. “Well-fed, I mean!”

“He’s grey as a mule, though.” Marc elbows Talfryn in the side. “I’m telling you, that Spacer radiation ages them faster.”

Both of them are right. Jet does look good. Not the towering giant with flinty eyes and a dashing scars…an Inuk version of Sir Caroline, now that Rilla thinks about it.

Emanoraq looks away from the screen and rubs her eyes. “He looks like a buff hobbit.”

Marc chokes on his cup of tea. Talfryn pounds him on the back.

“Mom!” cries Yuka, scandalized. 

“What? He does!”

“You should be praying for his safety, not bullying him for his height!”

“Oh, I should, should I? He hasn’t grown more than three centimeters since he left here, and he was only sixteen when he went! What’s his excuse? Laziness, pure and simple.”

Rilla mashes a hand against her mouth and swallows a laugh, trying to focus on the scene in Hyperion City. 

“He can’t hear me, you know! Besides, your aunt Arcady and I went through this phase of praying so hard for Jet, we both got ACL injuries from genuflecting so much. Pastor Nana let us sob on the floor from the pain for a long, long time before she called anybody to help. That woman- sick sense of humor. I’ve said my piece for him. If he gets rescued, he gets rescued. If he doesn’t, he escapes later and makes himself somebody else’s problem.”

Yuka rolls her eyes. “Ok, sure. I heard you this morning, though.”

Emanoraq’s face becomes stony. Rilla glances between her and the stoical man on the screen, on the verge of completing his last long mile. The expression is the same.

“You didn’t hear anything.”

“Yeah I did. I heard you crying and praying in the bathroom. Just because you turn on the faucet doesn’t mean that I can’t.”

“I was not praying!”

“What were you doing?”

Emanoraq’s face reddens. She flounders for an answer. “I was- I was rapping!”

Rilla joins Marc in his second fit of laughter. 

(Now, Nureyev) 

Nureyev is embarrassed by how long it has taken him to muster up some fear for Jet. He has known since last week that Jet was due to be executed; an execution as real as a paste jewel, but it will allow the Kanagawas to use Jet at their discretion after it is done. For a week, Nureyev knew that he was about to be robbed of the closest thing in the universe he has to a brother and kind of didn’t care. Part of that was the painkillers. Ya’allah, so many painkillers.  
Nureyev hasn’t said his salat for a few years now. He is kind of glad to have forgone that part of worship, because the way he has been for most of this and last week, Nureyev wouldn’t have been able to string together a coherent syllable of prayer if he was kneeling in front of the Ka’bah itself. 

He was, however, lucid enough to watch his doctors, to watch the horror and fascination that grew with each new scan and test. He even laughed when one of them fainted from looking at a scan of his lungs. Nureyev couldn’t see far enough to see it, but he has an idea of what’s going inside of him.  
Breathing is getting harder every day, so the cysts must have made it into his lungs. He expects the cysts marched up the length of his ribcage and stopped off at every organ that would have them. So far, his heart has been spared. The best for last? The disease wants Nureyev alive and aware of his pain for as long as possible?

Eh, Nureyev doesn’t care anymore. It is stupid to assume a disease has a motive. Nureyev is sick because of the people who ruled the place of his birth. He will die because of them as many others have and many others will. He is about to become a statistic. Another drop of blood to stain the hands of New Kinshasa, so that they will be utterly red when they are raised in supplication on the day their city is finally toppled.  
Nureyev didn’t think that was going to be his contribution to history. He figured he was going to pull off a few exceptional heists, destabilize a regime or two. It didn’t matter if anyone knew to assign those deeds to him- Nureyev never wanted fame. If Juno knew, if Juno were proud of him, that would be enough for Nureyev.

But now Nureyev is in a holding cell in Hoosegow to await his transport to what is probably a museum of medical history. Dark Matters just wants him out of the way. The Kanagawas have no use for a man who will be too sick to move in a few weeks. Nureyev’s only remaining value is as a medical curiosity- an example of what happens when one of the Brahmese Quartet has a long time to do its work.  
The part of him that is always calculating escape routes has noted that the bars are evenly spaced and, presumably because Nureyev’s illness has made him docile so far, don’t even have the energy shield on to shock him if he attempts to escape. And he could absolutely squeeze out between these bars if he wanted to. Nureyev would already be out of the cell and booking it down to the execution grounds if he thought there was any chance of helping Jet. But at this point, interfering would be more likely to get Jet hurt for real, and get Nureyev killed.

The only option that makes sense is for Nureyev to stay put and pray for his friend. Just let himself be taken away, to die and be placed in a display case in a few months.

Nureyev hopes that ghosts are real. Wherever his body ends up, he intends to haunt the shit out of the place. 

On the bright side, Jet has been well-taken care of. Nureyev was afraid that Cecil would graft a laser or a shark fin on him. The only thing that is different about Jet is that the huge hole in his arm was filled. He is missing the junk scars and the medicinal tattoo on the inside of his elbow, too. He is also visibly pissed-off. This is unusual for Jet.  
It makes Nureyev smile; if Jet has the energy to be mad about what is happening to him, he must be fine. 

“Wow.” 

It is the Earthling assigned to protect Mayor Mercury, leaning up against the bars and watching the stream. 

They nod to the stream, where Jet descending the stairs to the chair that has been set up for him, free-standing and sinister in the noon shadows, reminding Nureyev of historical photos of the Great Guillotine Riots. 

“He’s short. I think you Spacers don’t really know what an Earthling looks like, but he’s short. Pretty short by our standards. Like, we wouldn’t let him play basketball.” they give Nureyev a little grin over their broad shoulder. “Kinda cute, if you like petite men.”

“Petite?” repeats Nureyev.

“Ok, well, petite in that I could use him as a chin rest. He’s buffer than a draught horse, that’s for sure. Is that your type?”

The extra adrenalin and stimulants in Nureyev’s system have made him hyperaware of his surroundings, including what an unwelcome intrusion Mick’s Earthling is. They are enshrouded in a faint aura of ill intent. The kind of energy that comes off someone who likes to start bar-fights or makes off-color remarks to service staff who can’t talk back to them.  
Nureyev scoots further along the bench, deeper into the cell. 

“I am not sure that I get your meaning.”

“Y’know,” they gesture to the stream. “You’re trying to tap that, right?”

“Tap that?” repeats Nureyev drily. “You mean, am I attempting to seduce Jet Sikuliaq?”

“Yeah. I don’t know how much of his, uh, temple, you’ve seen, but that guy really takes the old adage to heart, you know? He’s got this fantastic bit of work on his back. A genuine tramp stamp-”

“I am aware of the tramp stamp, thank you.” 

“Good on you, then.”

“He is not,” continues Nureyev. “A romantic conquest to me, if that is what your crude little mind has interpreted of the situation.”

“Hey now, no need to get mean about it.”

“I would appreciate it if you would leave me alone, then.”

The Earthling gives him a second look. This one is more deliberate and searching in a way that’s intended to make Nureyev uncomfortable. Damn them if it doesn’t work.

Nureyev is spared from hearing whatever else the Earthling has to say by Cecil bursting into the lobby, trailed closely by his usual CamermanTM.

Cecil slams his calloused hands on the secretary’s laser-proof window, as if she did not hear him kick the door nearly off its hinges. “Where is my sister? Cassandra Cain? She’s going to make me late!”

“Sir-”

“Get on the PA and tell her to report to the goddamned front steps right now! It’s special orders from Min! Both of us need to be beside her!”

“I-”

“God!” Cecil lurches back. “Useless! Never mind, I’ll find her my damn self! It’s not as if I have anything else to do right now! Come on, Juno.”

He clasps the CameramanTM by the arm and drags it behind him, muttering under his breath. Nureyev catches the poor beast’s lens as it goes and shares a sympathetic cringe.

“Yech! Wish Cecil had picked literally any other name.” says the Earthling. 

Nureyev hates that he agrees. 

“Juno,” the name strangely bitter on the Earthling’s tongue. “That was the name of- well, you know how some people are just, like, absolute bombs? Like they’re bombshells and then they’re also bombs because they just, go off. They explode all over you and punch a great big hole in your life. I had a Juno do that to me, once. A regular daisy cutter.”

A chill washes over Nureyev’s body- a trickle of ice down his spine. His hands curl to fists.

“That is an uncommon name.”

The Earthling continues. Their eyes are still on Jet. They are not really talking to Nureyev so much as they are talking to themselves, their audience a stroke of serendipity. “Yeah, it’s a real romantic name too. But that lady ruined it for me. I can’t hear the name without thinking of him, and thinking of him just makes me want to scream until my throat rips in half. God. When I say he punched a hole, I mean, he was a fucking wrecking ball, just-”

Nureyev’s body hits the bars, hard. Some lucky, primitive instinct propels the Earthling forward just a second before they are within Nureyev’s reach. Instead of him catching them by the throat, though, Nureyev’s sharp nails just clip the lobe of their ear. They clap their hand to the wound and cry out in surprise as the fingers come away bloody.

“Jesus! What the fuck is your damage?”

“Diamond Té.” Nureyev snarls. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”

“Yeah? So what?” Diamond looks him up and down. “Why do you care?”

Their shoulder dampens with blood as the cut continues to flow. Nureyev clipped them pretty good.

“Come close and I’ll tell you.”

Once again, the door pops open and admits Mick. “Come on, Diamond, we’re supposed to be…uh…up front by now…” a glance between them and Nureyev, still against the bars with blood on his nails.

Nureyev should say something. How could Mick work with the person that hurt Juno so much? The only answer is that he must not know. Nureyev should say something.

Anger has sealed his mouth shut. He moves back from the bars and folds his arms behind his back.

Diamond takes a couple of deep breaths. A mask of calm and rationality slides over the malice. The gesture is so obviously practiced that Nureyev cannot see how Mick would want to be near Diamond, let alone in the same room with someone who apparently has a lot of experience with masking anger issues. 

“Just give me a few minutes in the washroom, sir. I’m fine. I’ll be right out after you.”

Mick glances at the secretary, who only shrugs. She is behind her laser-proof glass and intends to stay there. 

“Ok.” Mick holds the door open for Diamond and smiles. 

He stands there for several long, awkward moments, the smile never faltering, until Diamond finally realizes that Mick is not going to let them stay behind and dish out a beating on the prisoner covered in kidney-failure bruises. 

“He might be the best damn mayor Hyperion City has ever had.” whispers Nureyev as he returns to the cell bench.

“Small mercies in strange times.” the secretary chimes in. 

(Now, Jet)

Min Kanagawa stands beside the chair and addresses the entire universe through a microphone emblazoned with her corporate logo. Sasha Wire is on one side. The mayor is on the other but standing at a distance from them, so it looks more like he’s waiting for a train on the same platform on them instead of giving his support to a state execution. A sweet gesture, Jet thinks. And below them, beyond the little platform where the chair and the needle waits for him, a sea of reporter drones that lap at a shore of CameramenTM. This gathering is flanked by a ring of cops and what must be private detectives, three deep all the way around. 

Jet begins to sweat. The sun is fierce and there is barely a wisp of cloud to break it up. A bead of sweat rolls down the back of his neck. His reconstructed arm has begun to itch. Jet glances about him, looking for Cecil Kanagawa. Neither twin is in sight although they are both supposed to be here by now. Cassandra must be fixing her hair in a reflective surface somewhere, while Cecil tears around the prison ululating for his sister. 

Jet glowers against the sun. He raises a hand to shield his eyes, which makes several of the escort lean startle, begin raising their guns.

“Relax,” mutters Jet. 

“You relax.” snaps one of the escort- the one directly behind him.

Jet stops so quickly that the one behind him almost trips.

Hearing the stumble, Min glances over her shoulder. Jet starts moving again and allows himself to be put into the chair. Evidently, they mean to have him sit here for a while. To really rub it in the face of the universe that the Kanagawas and Dark Matters were the ones who caught the Unnatural Disaster. A shady organization and mafia family managed to do what whole governments couldn’t do in decades of chasing him. 

Jet tries to get comfortable. It is difficult considering he is in the direct sun, that his wrists are now being lashed to the arm-rests of the chair by one of the guards, while another messes with some controls in the back of the chair that prompts a large syringe and needle to rise on either side and hover over his upturned wrists. 

There is also the sheer amount of eyes on him. Jet is a private man in nature. He does not like being the center of attention. He certainly does not like being the current center of the universe’s attention. If Emanoraq and Arcady are watching now, he hopes they have changed the channel. If they haven’t changed the channel then they will probably be heckling him and tossing popcorn at the TV screen. 

Min is still talking. Jet risks a glance over his shoulder, past the guard who is lashing his wrists down, and sees Cecil coming down the steps. A CameramanTM and Cassandra trudge after him with identical expressions of misery.

“Hmm.”

“Comfortable?”

Jet looks up. With the most subtle and microscopic of movements, Jet tests the bindings on his wrists. They are so loose he could slide a hand out and scratch his nose right now if he wanted to.  
The guard raises her visor by an inch to show him a broad, lip-sticked smile.

“I asked you a question.” the guard lays a hand over his and squeezes. “Are you comfortable, darling?”

“I can manage.” says Jet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> People with anger issues are valid. Diamond is not valid because they choose not to work on anger management strategies and a lot of other reasons. Can't wait to beat them up in the next chapter.


	21. The End, part two: The wind up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: character with chronic illness, character discussing past drug habits, food, discussion of loss of family through death and fights, character facing execution by lethal injection (fake), large police presence, guns, a lot more strong language than usual, being knocked unconscious + put into recovery position, incarceration, being threatened with a gun, mentions of medical drugs/painkillers, a fight, a fall from a bit of a height, being shot at. 
> 
> Suggested listening: 'Helena Beat', Foster the People
> 
> Ok, I know I said we were going to beat Diamond up this chapter, and I promise we’ll get a bit of Diamond-beating here, but the real smack-down takes a bit more build up than I predicted. It’s going to be kind of ridiculous by the time it’s finished, but I think we deserve it

(About two years ago, the Outer Rim, Nureyev)

It is his week with Ruby7. At some point, without any discussion on the part of her car dads (“Call me that one more time,” says Jet. “And I cannot be held responsible for what I do.”), Ruby7 started to divide her time between Nureyev and Jet like the child of a divorced couple shuffling between homes. At first Jet was alarmed by this clear display of sentience, but he quickly found a way to dismiss it as another quirk of the car’s programming. Some type of algorithm based on the probability of her two most frequent users needing her, calculated according to patterns of behavior, GPS locations, blah blah blah.  
Nureyev stopped listening. The day Jet admits that their shared car is probably sentient is the day that Nureyev utters his real name. So very, very distant, and unlikely without a couple of mental breakdowns and brushes with death to wear down their boundaries.

This morning, Nureyev opened the door of his little flat-share to find Ruby7 parked across the street. In an empty lot. With a handful of tickets tucked into her wing mirrors.

Nureyev crossed the street to greet her and pluck the tickets out of her crannies. Just for fun, he fed them through the vents of her AC units and watched her shoot the shredded remains out of her tailpipe. Nureyev has begun to suspect that the tailpipe’s only function is comedic. He has certainly never seen Ruby7 produce any sort of gas or smoke when she wasn’t laying down rubber on the street, piercing an atmosphere or actively on fire. 

“You look like a nerd.” Nureyev told her, because it was true. The disguise she had picked to come meet him was far from flattering.

She was a squat, dented two-seater with an over-long hood and remarkably ugly wood paneling on either of her metal flanks. A deeply unsexy car, but unmemorable in its ugliness. As a fugitive in her own right, Ruby has got good instincts when it comes to disguises. The majority of the universe has no idea that Ruby is able to camouflage herself at all and those who do wouldn’t believe that the sleekest, fastest car in the known world is also capable of being an aesthetic nightmare like the smart-car she has shown up as today.

And again, like a parent checking that his kid has managed to get from the bus-stop to the co-parent’s house, Jet calls him that night. In anticipation of this call, Nureyev went out for a night-drive. It wouldn’t do his cover any favors if one of his roommates or a passing pedestrian heard him talking to the Unnatural Disaster. He let Ruby explore the downtown for a little while and then steered her towards the edge of the town, where urban sprawl melted off into chalk hills and blue-grass knolls.  
For a while Nureyev sat up on her hood and watched the silhouette of alien meerkats popping in and out of the sunset. He is on the verge of drifting off when the phone in Ruby’s dashboard starts to ring. Turning onto his side, Nureyev reaches through the open driver-side window and accepts the call.

Nureyev doesn’t understand the first thing Jet says. The Inupiaq he has picked up from Jet is composed of mostly swear-words and asking where he left his keys.

“Say what?”

“Oh!” Jet is surprised but pleased to hear him. “I was asking where Ruby7 had got off too. I suppose I should have guessed. How is Pluto treating you?”

“I’m nowhere near Pluto.”

“Ah. Well, how is the vacuum of space treating you?”

Jet never knows where the hell Nureyev is- as a rule. Unless one of them needs a favor from the other, say, if Nureyev is near to a specialty shop which carries a part Jet might need. 

This month, Jet hasn’t got a clue where Nureyev is and nor does he need to know. This is a down-time month. Nureyev is living with a couple of other folks whose work makes them transient, which explains his patchy renter’s history and solitary nature. He has told one of them he is an ore miner, a second that he is an ex-military mechanic in between salvages and hinted to the third that he is on the run from some hefty alimony payments. It is better to make sure that no one can get the story straight if someone attempts to track him down. There are a handful of months like this every now and then, where Nureyev has few light heists, one or two low-effort sabotages, giving himself a break in between his more involved projects. This year, there was an opportunity for a heist that would leave Nureyev with half of the emerald fortune of a Dysomniac land baron.  
Nureyev gave it a miss. He couldn’t forget what Jet had hinted at outside the Hanataba clinic. Half an invitation, half a threat. Now, he is sure that whatever Jet is involved in is not only the dismantling of a gigantic, centuries-old medical monopoly, but a chance to be near Juno Steel. 

Apparently Nureyev is not so jaded as he thought. He has been debating the issue in his head- how much of this is wanting to not be sick anymore? How much of this is wanting to be close to Jet as his life draws ever closer to the cascading organ failure that has buried most of his generation already? How much of this is just stubborn, wounded pride? A compulsion to show the lady that left him that, hey, fuck you, I’m fine! I can survive without you! I did not need a month to recover from that betrayal and the weird experience that lead up to it, and I definitely did not spend that month face-down on my friend’s couch. 

“What are you up to at the moment?”

“Cooking.” the hiss of something in a pan. “I loathe to ask this, but what are you eating at the moment?”

Nureyev should lie to spare Jet the worry. He should. But the lie does not sit well on his tongue and the truth shoves past before he can stop it. “I had a smoothie for dinner.”

“A ‘smoothie’.”

“I… I mixed olive brine with pickle juice. It wasn’t too bad.”

“Pakak-”

“And before that I had some untoasted bread with whipped cream and an uncooked stem of broccoli because I was having a busy afternoon.”

“Pakak. Stop talking.”

Beneath him, Ruby honks her horn in agreement. 

Nureyev flicks her windshield wiper. “Hush, you. You have no frame of reference for whether or not that is objectionable.”

“Has it not occurred to you that your eating habits are so repulsive that even a car can tell?”

“No. Personally, I think the pair of you are judgmental. I’ve half a mind to hang up and spend some time with these meerkats. I’m sure they would be less fussy about what I chose to put in my body.”

“Why would you align yourself with- meerkats eat woodlice straight out of the dirt!”

There is a joke in there, somewhere, about how Nureyev will have earned his kidney failure when it eventually does come because of the way he eats. Jet is a decent man for not making it.

They talk about a few more things, about a few contacts they have in common, about Rauho Noorssen’s long stint lurking on his private satellite, about the medical company from which Nureyev is in the process of securing a replacement kidney, about the weird dream Jet had the other week where his sisters were chasing him on a Zamboni through a dark wood and whether or not he should re-start therapy…  
Naturally, the conversation drifts towards the collaboration that is on both of their minds.

“It’s still on, is it?”

“In two months, yes. Buddy put it back a bit to give her wife a bit more time to reacclimatize to freedom.”

“And the positions are all filled?”

“Yes.” says Jet testily. Avoiding the bigger question, which answers it just the same. Juno is probably or most definitely going to be along for the ride.

“Save for the one you offered to me.”

“Save that one.”

“Well then, I suppose you must have a good deal of candidates to sort through.”

Jet turns away to muffle a yawn. “I suppose we must.”

“Are you sure, though, that you want to share a living space with me again? I remember we clashed somewhat last time.”

“Clashed? I remember you claimed a mastery of all domestic chores. I remember that, yes, while you could work a vacuum, a rice cooker and a washing machine, you also ate Spam, unseasoned, out of a tin-”

“I’ll come along.”

Jet falls silent for a moment. The pan continues to hiss on the stove.

When Jet speaks again, there is a smile in his voice. “Alright.”

“It would be best if we, well, let’s not say we keep it a secret, but let’s also not advertise how long we have known each other. I just would prefer-”

“That is fine. You don’t have to explain yourself to me. I’m hesitant to claim you as an old friend, anyway, knowing what you might do in the kitchen.”

Nureyev laughs. “Don’t bait me.”

“Well, you had better let Buddy know that you’ll come along. The sooner the better. I can send you an encrypted phone number if you like.”

“Is she there now?”

“Is she- one second.” 

He calls her several times before he is answered by the shuffling of house slippers and an irritable murmur that sounds like: “Well I hope you got me out of the good chair for a good reason.”

“Put me on speaker.”

“You’re on speaker.”

“Yes.” says Nureyev. 

Faintly, from Buddy “What was that? Did you propose to someone?”

“That was the thief.”

“Ah, yes, that skinny man who ate yoghurt on our couch. An excellent acquisition, I’m sure.”

“Buddy, he can hear you.”

“Ah. Well, hello, stranger. I look forwards to getting to know you better. I am now going to return to the good chair and finish my program, if you don’t mind.” 

Even more faintly, a raspy voice joins in. “Will you fishwives quit yelling at each other? I can’t hear the damn TV.”

Jet takes Nureyev off speaker and excuses himself to another room to finish the conversation.

“You heard the other woman just now? That was Vespa Ilkay.”

“I heard she turned up again. I’m glad for Buddy to have her wife back.”

“My God, Pakak, you wouldn’t say that if you knew the woman.” but Jet’s voice is soft and fond. “Getting to know her has been like negotiating my way through an ice-floe with a spoon instead of a proper paddle. Not just that she has a few psychosis problems- those, one can make allowances and management strategies for. The problem is her personality. But I am sure you don’t want to hear me complain.”

Nureyev wants nothing more than to listen to Jet verbally eviscerate his new roommate, but if he’s going to share Vespa as a team-mate soon then he’d better get into the habit of being diplomatic now.

“Jet, may I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“It’s not that I’m not glad that you’re doing this. I just wonder why now, of all times.” Nureyev lays a hand over his stomach, thinking about the tissue that metastasizes underneath. “

“Why not when Dark Matters put my parents in front of a firing squad?” says Jet casually.

“Jesus, Jet. I wasn’t thinking about that.”

“No, you weren’t, I’m sorry. That is…that is what has been on my mind. There’s your answer, by the way. You have something to do with it too.”

Nureyev groans and turns onto his side, his cheek laying against the edge of Ruby’s hood. She is still warm from the trip out and the sun on her body. “Forbidden topic.”

“You asked. I know it is a sensitive subject…but I’ll make my stance on said subject clear all the same. I would prefer it if you didn’t die. If the cure-mother can do something to help your illness-”

“Alright, alright, you bleeding heart. Now you’ve put me on edge, Jet. The other thing you mentioned…is that what this is? A revenge against Dark Matters?”

Jet is quiet for a moment. Long enough that Nureyev wonders if he should have let it be.

“Revenge…revenge is the wrong word. Responsibility is the right one, I think. I involved myself in Dark Matters the moment I began to act in their areas of influence. I became a competitor. A danger. An opponent. I stole from them, I killed their people, I humiliated them and thwarted them a few times, though I’ll admit most of that wasn’t down to heroism so much as it was selfish…survival.”

“That’s not a bad thing, Jet.” says Nureyev. “Survival.”

“But it is. The way I chose to practice it when my family- even though I didn’t think they would do anything, even though you and every other person in the universe thought they wouldn’t, Dark Matters killed my parents in front of their own community. They paid for it. They had to retreat and called it a ‘ceasefire’, when meanwhile the entire underworld knew that Dark Matters had just had its ass handed to them by a few thousand civilian Earthlings, but that’s…beside the point. Where was I, in all this? I was waiting for it to be over. Perhaps if I were in the middle of a mission or a binge or- or anything that could have taken away my focus, anything to compromise my thinking more than usual. But I was not. I was…unmoved.”

He has to take a deep breath before he continues. Several of them. 

“I have asked myself so many times why I let that happen. I have asked myself what kind of a person lets that happen to his family. The short answer is…I am that man. I am the man who does not care about his family enough to take care of them. There is no one in the universe who still loves me because they want to. My sisters despise me and would kill me if they had the chance. At the same time, the memories of who I used to be compel them to love me. They cannot help it. That cannot be the only kind of legacy I leave, Pakak, the man who was born into more love than many people can conceive of existing, then destroyed the people that gave that it to him so profoundly.”

“You want to be loved.”

“I want to be worthy of it again, yes.”

Wiping his eyes, Nureyev thanks god that this is an audio-only call. “If this doesn’t work, Jet-”

“It has to.”

“I believe you want it to. I believe you will make it work. But, just in case, if it doesn’t work, Jet, you’re not going to die unloved. Provided that I don’t outlive you.”

(Now)

Cassandra is only about ten minutes later for the press conference. Had things gone her way, she would have missed it entirely, but Diamond doubled back from Mick to find her and turfed her out of the supplies closet where she intended to sit with a podcast until things were over. Diamond took her by the forearm and frog-marched her out as far as the steps, at the bottom of which is the press conference. They ignored Cassandra’s question about the blood on their shoulder and the missing bit of earlobe. 

Min waxes eloquent about the burden of upholding societal order. She looks flawless, in spite of the incredible heat and the sweat dripping off of everyone else. It is a kind of strange talent of Min’s, to suspend inconvenient biological functions such as sweating, sneezing, needing to scratch herself when she has a large audience.  
And today, although no Hyperion City local would be idiot enough to attend the execution in person, she knows she has got their attention. She knows she has got the attention of the entire world on her. No way will she compromise the vision of the Kanagawa conglomerate’s omnipotence by letting a little thing like a 40+ degree weather make her look nervous. 

Cassandra trudges down the stairs to join her. Before she has gotten more than two steps down, Diamond takes her arm and pulls her back, perhaps a bit more roughly than necessary. 

“Where is your brother?”

Cassandra tries to wrench her arm away, but Diamond is stronger. Far stronger. “I don’t know.”

“He was looking for you.”

“Well he didn’t find me. Maybe he went back home. He probably did, you know.”

Diamond lets go of her. Cassandra rubs at the red mark on her forearm. 

“Are you coming?”

“Obviously I can’t. I have to go find your goddamned brother. The mayor should be able to manage not to get shot with all of Mrs Kanagawa’s security around him. Speaking of, are you wearing it? Your-”

“Yes! I’m not an idiot and I don’t have a death wish, Jesus. About Cecil, I’m telling you, I think he went home.” says Cassandra “He told me something this morning about hanging around the house. He said he forgot to do something for the next ‘Jaws Of Death’.”

Rolling their eyes, Diamond puts their back to Cassandra and the crowd. “What are you two trying to pull? Cecil wouldn’t miss this much attention.”

“He would if he remembered he had to go torment something or push a corpse into Space-Hell. You think Cecil cares more about Min’s stuff than his own stuff?”

Diamond is not listening in the slightest. Well, fine! Cassandra hopes they are stuck wandering in circles around Hoosegow for hours. 

Coming to stand beside the mayor, Cassandra shields her eyes against the punishing sun. Its effects are worsened by the sea of CameramanTM lens trained on the stage, reflecting and concentrating the glare so much that Cassandra is a little bit afraid they might set something on fire. Wisely, the mayor has brought a pair of sunglasses, but is not so wisely wearing a half-length jacket, which might also be a wise decision- surely if he passes out from heatstroke, Min won’t make him stay for the whole execution. Cassandra should have thought of that.  
Cassandra also wishes she had a tinted visor like the guards. Basically, any form of protection from the harshness of the heat. The Unnatural has put his head down and twisted as much as he can in the chair without scratching his wrists on the needles. He has got to be sweating underneath his princess-braid. Or maybe he just wants to avoid the stares of the guards around him, who are blatant in their curiosity even with visors in front of their eyes. 

Most of them know that this is not the last time they will see the Unnatural Disaster. However, this may well be the closest they will ever be to him. As usual, Cassandra is out of the loop in terms of the specifics, but she does know that the Unnatural is going to be moved out of Hoosegow after his execution. They might stick him in one of the underground annexes attached to the manor, they might clear out a room for him in that warehouse that is holding all of the Martian-settlers, they might just put him in Cassandra and Cecil’s old room which is still kitted out with bunk-beds. Of course, Min won’t leave him alone wherever he is sent.  
Hopefully, the 

“Sweating like shit over here.” Cassandra mumbles.

Mick nods.

“Did I miss your speech?”

Tight-lipped, he shakes his head. At that point Cassandra realizes the stiffness with which Mick holds himself is not just nerves; he has got a holstered gun tucked underneath the jacket.  
She cocks an eyebrow and tries to catch Mick’s eye. He refuses to look at her.

“Do you know how to use that thing?” she whispers.

Mick side-steps away from her. 

“Because it’s not as easy as it looks. I mean, you could use it like a club if you wanted to, but I’m guessing that’s not what you want to use it for.”

“I don’t want to use it at all.” he says, too low for the mics to pick up. 

Cassandra can’t help but feel for the poor guy. He’s in over his head- a few hundred feet over his head. Cassandra is so busy thinking about how much it sucks to be Mick right now, how at least, considering her prison sentence, her domineering family, her utter lack of physical or mental freedom, she is not Mick Mercury, when things start to go wrong for Min Kanagawa.

The first thing that happens is a shadow falls over the crowd of CameramenTM and progresses slowly up the ranks. A couple heads tilt upwards. A few of them squint and shade their lens with their hands. Min does not notice. The guards do not notice, except for Buddy, who was watching for this. Not enough of the CameramenTM have looked away to change the stream. Only a few of the officers and private detectives are watching the CameramenTM, and look up as well. There is ample opportunity to warn Min on the parts of both the CameramenTM and the HCPD. Nobody takes it.

At the last minute, a spiny shadow whips over the stage. Mick and Sasha look up as one. Sasha’s hand falters for her gun. But Sasha has already seen who is on the dragon. For better or worse, she cannot make herself draw a gun on him.

The Unnatural Disaster hasn’t got a mic on him, so the only people to hear his faint oath are the guards encircling him: “Jesus holy Christ.”

And so Min does not see the dragon nor its rider until they are landing on top of her. 

And land on top of her it almost does. The green column of the dragon’s body plants itself inches behind her. Wind buffets from its wings and propels Min into the podium, nearly skewering her on the microphones. A clawed foot slaps the stage and gives her a flat tire. Behind Min, shielding the Unnatural from his audience with enormous bat-like wings, the dragon rears up, and on that dragon’s back with his arms fastened about the dragon’s neck is a lady familiar to all of Hyperion City.

He stole away from them in secret to lick his wounds and forget what happened to the man he conveyed to the mayoral office. Now, clad in the gossamer leathers and armor of an alien people, he has come back at the last moment to interrupt the Unnatural Disaster’s execution. 

Juno Steel has come home to Hyperion. And he has brought some friends. 

(Jet)

Laughter is not the appropriate response to this in any way. He really should stop. But then, what is the appropriate response to one’s friend showing up on dragon-back, dressed up like an Earthling Citizens’ Volunteer, with a goddamned four-armed nymph on the dragon behind him? Obviously, Juno went to Earth. Obviously, Juno picked up some souvenirs. Jet has many, many questions about the four-armed nymph in particular, and did Juno mean to dress himself a bit like Andromeda? Because he really looks like Andromeda. Take a few dozen centimeters off and swap the flail for a bow and arrow, and it’s Andromeda, right down to the dragon and the waifish wizard-looking sidekick. 

Buddy clasps a hand over his mouth, shooting him a worried look through her visor. Jet can’t stop laughing, though, and his voice is just about the only noise apart from the wind. 

Juno ignores him. He swings a leg over the dragon’s shoulder and, moving smartly over Min, plants himself on the podium as if it is a stepladder. Min stares at his greave-clad calves for a moment, considers her position, then politely scoots out from between the dragon and their rider. This pushes Jet into fresh hysterics. 

The nymph glances over his shoulder at Jet in obvious concern. Buddy makes eye-contact and can only shrug; she has no idea what’s wrong with him either.

Juno squats and taps a microphone with his knuckle. “It’s on? It’s- oh, ok, we got some feedback. Ok. Uh. People of Hyperion City! What. The. Fuck?”

He points backwards at Min. “Since when did the Kanagawas become the representation of the vox populi, huh?” he points sidelong, at Cassandra, who is using the mayor as a shield while Mick just stands there, slack jawed. “And why are you guys letting the mayor be jerked around on puppet strings like this, huh? Look at him! He clearly hates this! He- hi, Mick, by the way, congratulations- he’s miserable! And letting Dark Matters take you over like this? What the hell, people?”

The nymph slides off the dragon’s back and stalks towards Sasha Wire. Sasha looks like she just took a grenade to the gut. When the nymph raises a knife in front of him, inviting her to attack him or try to lunge past for Juno, Sasha just keeps staring. She seems to have forgotten what a stance like that means. She seems to have forgotten where she is or how or how to speak aloud.  
Jet doesn’t blame her. Staring in silent shock is better than the giggling fit that has caught ahold of him. 

Now Juno address the ranks of police and detectives. “And you people! ‘Serve and protect’ my ass. We all know that’s bunk. I was one of you. We all know it’s rotten. From the inside out. Is Omar Khan here? I can smell spaghetti and disapproval. He’s got to be here.”

In the first few rows at the front, a hand goes up. Several dozen CameramenTM heads swivel in one direction. Khan pushes up the brim of his hat and stares back at Juno.

“Where were you?” he shouts. He is not angry. Jet gets the sense that this is the normal volume of speech for him.

“Doesn’t matter. Where were you when this all happened, huh?”

“When what happened?”

Juno points between Min and Cassandra. “What the fuck do you think, Omar? What do you think I’m mad about? Why is the goddamned Unnatural Disaster getting publicly executed? He doesn’t even know where to go to rob our fucking banks! What is happening?”

Khan’s face purples. “It got out of hand-”

“And you couldn’t get it back in hand, could you? Because Min owns half the city and the other half of the city belongs to people who work with her! Because this city is run by a team of money-hungry, blood-sucking oligarchs and all we, the people, can do is elect one or two poor souls to float on top of that sea of shit like pool noodles! And then the sewage gets inside of them and soon they’re no better!”

Oh, Juno, maybe not this metaphor. Evocative and powerful but perhaps a little bit distracting in the image it does evoke. 

“I mean, really, what value does your office have? What do you except for cost the city money and try to legitimize a nasty, stupid, useless system we should have thrown out centuries ago? I don’t care if you think you’re ‘one of the good ones’, Omar, because you know the system is rotten and you still don’t have the courage to do shit about it because that would mean losing power! Am I wrong?”

Sweat rolls down Khan’s temples. His mouth moves, but his voice doesn’t carry.

“I said, am I wrong, Omar?” 

Beside him, a detective raises their gun. Khan pushes the gun down with a dark look. 

“No.”

“Then why are you still here?”

“Somebody has to protect Hyperion.”

“You’re protecting the Kanagawas right now.”

Hearing her name jolts Min back to reality. But while Juno continues to read Khan and Hyperion City at large a riot act, Min turns her attention to the most important thing on the stage; Jet. 

“Get the Unnatural inside right now!” shouts Min. “One of you get him up to his cell! The rest of you, get ready for-”

“I’ll do it!” Buddy blurts. “I- I had better! I’m allergic to dragons I won’t be of much use down here.”

There is no time to interrogate the stupidity of her claim. While the other guards raise their weapons and converge protectively about Min, Buddy pops Jet free of his loose restraints and points the muzzle of her rifle at him. The safety is very obviously switched on. She guides him up with the muzzle planted to his spine, back the way he came.  
At first she keeps a brisk walking pace. Then, as the wind picks up, there is a burst of laser-fire that grows from a few chirps to a full roar. In unison, they start running. Taking the steps three at a time. Jet shoulders the door open and Buddy barrels under his arm and slams it shut with her entire body. For a few seconds the two of them catch their breath, leaning against the door as if they expect to be barricading themselves against an entire army. But no one has followed. 

Why would they? Buddy is a guard, by all appearances, moving an asset out of the way. Besides there’s a sort-of outlaw on a dragon out there. That stuff tends to draw the eye a bit more. 

Inside, the hall is empty. Just about every guard in Hoosegow is presiding over an enormous gathering of prisoners on the main floor of the prison- being watched together so nobody attempts to break out while the staff is halved between them and bulking up the ranks of police outside.

“Are you alright? You weren’t shot?”

“They weren’t shooting at us.”

“And your wound? Juno said you had a knife in you.”

“It’s fine, now. They rebuilt it.”

“Which of your arms was it?”

Jet raises the reconstructed arm.

Buddy nods, then slugs him in the other shoulder.

“Ow!”

Buddy flips her visor up. Her face, both sides, are purpled from effort and anger that must just be making its way to the surface now. “I’m sorry, darling, that was immature of me.”

She punches him again, in the same spot. Jet dodges the third and fourth attempts and catches her fist on the fifth swing.

“What is wrong with you? Do you have any idea what you put us through, letting yourself get kidnapped? We had to go to Space Hell! Then Earth! There were dinosaurs, Jet, zombie dinosaurs!”

Jet sputters. “Why the- why did you-”

“Because we were being chased and none of us can drive the CB as well as you do! And then Ruby popped out of the garage- when were you going to tell me that you’ve been using a goddamned Martian as our escape and commuter vehicle?”

“A Martian? Did you hit your head?”

Buddy makes a swing for him with her free arm. Jet blocks it. For a moment she just leans into him trying to get traction, her boots squeaking fruitlessly on the linoleum.

“Oh the hell with it!” she relents and slackens into a begrudging hug. “You damned ox. I’ll just beat up Nureyev.”

“Who?”

Buddy rolls her eyes so hard the mechanical one groans a complaint. “So you were unaware that your car is a Martian and you weren’t even pretending that you didn’t know who your best friend of twenty years was?”

Jet rankles. “Buddicia, a name is simply a name. I know everything about Pakak that I need to know. After you watch a man tip canned, shredded tuna into a jar of wasabi and eat that devil’s concoction with a spoon, you know there is a darkness in them. You have had a demonstration of the evil they are capable of. I don’t give a damn what kind of past he has attached to whatever his ‘real’ name is. All I care about is where he is.”

“You don’t know? I thought you knew!”

“And you don’t?”

“No!”

Jet puts his fist through the dry-wall and puts his forehead above the hole he has made. Buddy bends to scream into her thighs. 

“Ok! Split up! If you find Nureyev, text me on this,” she pushes a burner comms into his hand. “And head for the necropolis. I know, it’s inconvenient to have to galavant through the city,

“Is that a good idea?”

Buddy puts her visor up again. “Absolutely not, darling, but we don’t have time to be smart. You saw that ship on the helipad. If that’s not one of Noorssen’s people coming for Nureyev, I’ll eat my own prosthetic.”

“Please don’t.”

“Here, have my rifle.”

Jet accepts. “What are you going to use?”

Buddy shifts about a few plates of her armor and reveals a fanny-pack tucked underneath. From within, she draws a small, fat blade. Oh- no, it’s still going. It is very long. That is a sword. That is a broadsword.

“This may not be the time to ask, but where did you get an enchanted fanny-pack? And where did you get a sword to hide in it?”

“A nice man named Damien.”

“I- alright. That was him on the dragon?”

“No, that was Arum. Very much on our side. They’re buying us as much time as possible to find Nureyev and the settlers. Don’t you worry about the settlers, though, Vespa and Damien are working on that. And the dragon is Ruby. She is a Martian. A shape-shifting Martian. Fully sentient. I am going to continue to repeat that Ruby is a Martian until I get some reaction out of you.”

“I know!” Jet snaps. “I know, alright? I knew she is sentient. I just didn’t want to think about it!”

Buddy claps him on the chest. “Good man! Repress it, deal with it later! Just remember that the dragon is friendly if it happens to come up. You go that way, I’ll go this way. Pretend I’m due to take him up to the roof or something, but we can’t wait until I find someone with an answer.”

Splitting up feels wrong to Jet. How is he going to explain himself if he is caught or seen by a stray guard? What if Pakak, or Nureyev, or whatever that assless fool calls himself, what if he’s being kept in the Panopticon? That is the makings for a total shoot-out. Well, if Buddy is going to find someone to ask, Jet might as well do the same. He is a large man, from Spacers’ perspectives, and has a large gun. They will answer him.  
As they part, Jet cannot help but look back at Buddy. A brief reunion for all the effort she and the others must have spent to make it happen. They could go, now, make a clean escape without anyone knowing for a while yet. Nureyev would want them to go. He would argue that he is sick and superfluous. That it doesn’t matter where he ends up because he is just a ghost, and one cannot rescue a ghost. 

Except that spiel doesn’t work on Jet; he has heard it before in situations that were almost worse than this, digested it, recognized the rhetoric for the nonsense that it is and expelled it from his mind. Jet is immune to that type of self-sacrificing blather.

The first person Jet finds is a secretary, going by the tablet and files balanced in her arms. She has got her head down and her headphones turned up loud so that she doesn’t notice Jet until she is on the verge of bumping into him.

For the sake of the bit, Jet levels the gun at her. The safety is still on but he’s guessing that is not in the frame of mind to notice. “Rex Glass. The asset being dispatched from Hoosegow today. Where have they put him?”

She screams. The tablet and flies spill to the ground.

Jet repeats himself, bumping her shoulder with the muzzle of the gun for emphasis.

“Transit! If they’re moving him, he’ll be in the holding cells at transit!”

“And that is where?”

“Straight on, to the left! Oh, God, please, please don’t kill me! I have a family! I have a book to finish! I have-”

She continues to beg for her life for a few minutes after Jet has moved past her, stepping smartly over the things she dropped. He will feel bad about that later. 

Luckily for Jet, Hoosegow has a lot of signage. The holding cells would be easy to find even without directions. By the time he has come up on the room labelled transit, the sound of whatever hellfire Juno and Min are exchanging is coming through, like thunder. This side of the prison does not even face the fight and yet the windows judder in their sills with each of the distant blows.

It is the sound of this battle that distracts the lone guard posted in transit. He has also got a TV remote in his hand and a confused expression, staring up at the static-fizzing screen. The guard doesn’t see what knocks him to the ground, nor what rolls him gingerly into a corner with a foot. Jet has stooped to arrange the guard into the recovery position when he hears it.  
A whistle; Nureyev leans against the bars of the furthest holding cell as casually as if it were a café table and he were signaling for a waiter. 

“Shouldn’t you be dead by now?”

Jet considers shooting him. Instead, he covers the 20 meters between them in 2 seconds and catches himself on the bars of Nureyev’s cell.

“Are you alright?”

Nureyev gestures at the bracelets of bruises up and down his arms. “I’m as well as can be expected with late stage kidney failure. They’ve got me full of painkillers for the transit, though, so I could do a back-flip if I wanted to.”

“Hold tight, I’ll have you out of there in a second.” Jet looks for a keypad to crush.

“Wait. I think I might be able to- oh, there we go!”

Nureyev slides his skinny self through the bars and into a gentle bear-hug.

“Odd design flaw, that. I suppose most of the time they’ve got shields up or something.”

As soon as they touch, Jet bursts into tears. His voice, however, remains steady. “I thought I was lost. I thought you were lost. I thought we were-”

Nureyev thumps him between the shoulder blades. “But we’re not, are we? Dry your eyes. You know I’m a sympathetic crier. If you go on for much longer, we’ll both be wrecks. Come on, deep breaths.”

“You take a deep breath.” Jet snaps. “What were you thinking, following me into this?”

Nureyev raises an eyebrow. “Really? You want to get into this right now? With an audience and all?” he gestures to the secretary, who is pretending to read a magazine. She has somewhat ruined the illusion by forgetting to keep her eyes on the page.

Jet wipes a sleeve across his eyes. “Fine, we will discuss this later. Are you well enough to run with me?”

Nureyev cocks an eyebrow. He makes Jet stand back and executes a perfectly balanced backflip.  
“Does that answer your question?”

Good to see that his sense of drama hasn’t failed along with those kidneys. 

Jet informs Buddy as such: _found him. He can still backflip. See you at the necropolis_

Nureyev glances out the window, but they open onto the badlands behind Hoosegow and undomed Martian desert behind. All he can see of the fight at the front of the complex is a plume of smoke drifting overhead.

“What happened out there? It sounds like a warzone.”

“It probably is at this point,” Jet stashes the comms in his pocket. “Do you know which way we go to get to the necropolis?”

“How many backflips will it take to convince you that I’m not about to drop dead? Getting a bit enthusiastic, there, Jettfrey.”

“That’s our rendezvous point.”

“Ah. In that case, it’s a short run or a middling walk in that direction.”

Unfortunately, the way Nureyev has pointed them involves walking by the Panopticon. Not just by it, in fact, but over the damned plexiglass dome of the thing. The only way across is a small catwalk that sits less than a dozen meters over the surface. They are definitely going to be noticed. If they are lucky, it will be only by inmates who mistake them for guards.

“Quite a few folks in Hoosegow now, aren’t there? I think we know that woman.” Nureyev takes a tentative step onto the catwalk. His prison-issue slippers are made of a slippery material that has got him clutching the handrail for dear life. 

Jet puts a hand in the small of Nureyev’s back for support, which makes him wince.

“What? What hurts?”

“I just- there’s a cyst close to bone, back there. Could you move up a bit higher?”

“Hey!”

Like a pair of high-schoolers caught in their parents’ liquor cabinet, Jet and Nureyev freeze, exchange a terrified glance and turn mechanically to look over their shoulders.

It is Mick’s Earthling and they are not in the slightest bit surprised to see Jet out of his cage. Their massive frame fills up the narrow catwalk, shaking the mesh floor as they walk out to meet the escapees. Less than a quarter of the way across the catwalk and they’ve been caught already.  
Diamond’s face is smeared with shadows, in spite of them being in direct sun. 

“God, it’s just one thing after a-fucking-nother today! First I have to get the mayor here, then I have to wrangle the twins, then some secretary frightened out of her wits tells me that the Unnatural is on the loose! I would have thought she was huffing carbon monoxide except, I mean, you can hear the goddamned fire-storm outside from the ground floor. Jesus.”

“You should go back.” says Jet. “You won’t win this fight.”

Glowering, they spread their arms wide as if for an embrace. “Go on. Shoot me. You think Min would just put us up there without something to protect us? Everybody on that stage is wearing-”

Jet aims between their eyes. More than an inch in front of their face, the laser simply switches direction and scorches a hole in the ceiling.

“Motherfucker!” exclaims Nureyev.

“One of you is going back to a cell. One of you is going to get on a ship and the hell out of my hair. Now, no matter what you do, that is what is going to happen. You two can try for me if you want, but that’s just gonna make this worse for you. Hell, I’ll even be nice. I’ll let you say goodbye to each other. I won’t even hit you, although I really, really want to and you, Glass, you really deserve it. How does that sound?”

At his shoulder, Nureyev rolls up onto his toes and whispers: “That’s Diamond. Diamond Té.”

Ah. Suddenly getting to the necropolis isn’t Jet’s top priority anymore. 

Jet closes the distance between him and Diamond very quickly. They are in the midst of reaching for a huge knife on their belt when Jet grasps the gun by the muzzle and makes a swing for Diamond. They bend so far backwards that they fall flat onto their back. The butt of the gun smashes into- through- the banister and snaps in half in Jet’s hands. Undeterred, Jet wields the heavier half like a hammer and brings it down on Diamond. They catch the blow on their forearm, shattering Jet’s weapon in half again. Diamond rolls onto their side and off the catwalk. They land 6 meters below and roll up to a kneeling position without a hint of discomfort.  
Beneath them, cracks web the plexiglass. The entirety of the Panopticon is now staring up at them.

“Fucking Earthlings!” is all Nureyev can say before Diamond opens fire on them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spam is a versatile product. It can be consumed in a myriad of ways and has been incorporated into many dishes across many cultures. We should celebrate Spam. We should not, however, celebrate Nureyev, who doesn’t season it, add it to a dish, nor even warm it up. Nureyev is evil. Don’t be a Nureyev. Treat Spam with the dignity it deserves.


	22. The End, part 3: The Pitch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Suggested listening: Mother Mother, 'Problems'
> 
> Trigger warnings: cops, shooting with sci-fi guns, being shot at, being wounded by said sci-fi guns, major character death, trauma to chest, mentions of the afterlife, injuries from glass, burns, scrapes, skin trauma, non-consensual body modification+ surgeries, strong language, bear traps, character with chronic illness, character with chronic illness using painkillers+ feeling effects of their illness, mention of organ failure, incarcerated children, mentions of torture devices, mentions of stolen cultural items like masks/tools to be held in a collection

(Juno, Hoosegow)

Someday, someone will ask Juno what he considers to be the stupidest thing he has ever done. 

Perhaps it will be a stranger in a bar whose curiosity is aroused by the mysterious lady nursing a mocktail in the corner (nowadays, Juno imagines the Juno of the future to be a kind of less stylish version of Buddy). Perhaps, it will be Rita’s children, or, if Utqiagvik is as welcoming as it promised to be when they do get the other Sikuliaq back, Jet’s niece, perhaps even Soup’s children or pets that serve the same emotional function. 

Without hesitation, Juno will point to this moment.

The stupid isn’t specifically his fault- Ruby helped make it crazier and Arum didn’t make any move to tamp their crazy down. Their role is to distract the media, Min and anybody else with a gun or a weapon who might prove a problem. The exact shape of that distraction was not specified and thus Juno has taken advantage of the fact that he kind of looks like Andromeda in Utqiagvik’s community armor, and Ruby has taken advantage of the fact that her body’s shape is limited only by her imagination.  
Accidentally cosplaying while he attempts to save his friends and shake the Kanagawas up in the process? Yeah, Juno thinks he has peaked in terms of the stupidity he is capable of. 

And now that he is up here, stood on Min Kanagawa’s podium and empowered to speak the whole of his mind to Hyperion City for the first time in his life, Juno is surprised to find himself angry. Very, very angry. The words come out of him naturally.

He shouldn’t have to be here. He shouldn’t have to be the one saying this, as a common citizen with no especial qualifications nor training to speak for anybody, and yet, because he just happens to be the lady standing on the podium.  
Mick is here. Sasha is here- goddammit Sasha. Dark Matters and the Kanagawas are basically making each other friendship bracelets at this point. Maybe Juno should have kept in better contact with her? Maybe then he wouldn’t have been as surprised. Or, maybe, just maybe, Sasha should have glanced at her moral compass without prodding and realized that she was not doing a bit of good for her hometown. They are going to fight about this later. 

For now, though, hold the spotlight. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Buddy pretending to escort Jet into the prison. Should take them about thirty seconds to get up to safety- Juno can bully Omar for that much longer.  
And then, one of Min’s jackasses decides to up the ante by shooting at him. The laser hits Juno square in the back. Buried in the laser-proofed Earthling armor, Juno feels it like a flick. It barely budges him but apparently that’s all the permission the rest of the guards need; they light Juno up. 

Juno can only compare the sensation of the several dozen lasers bouncing off his vital spots to the time he walked in on Benzaiten making popcorn in an open pan; the barrage of hot projectiles into his back is definitely not pleasant, but he’ll survive.  
So he sets his shoulders, puts his head down and waits it out, hoping that Arum and Ruby aren’t getting too much on the ricochet. 

Over the chirruping swell of laser-fire, a voice rises. 

“HOLD YOUR FIRE!”

The command booms out of Mick and freezes the guards to the spot. Even Min, who has got a gun out of some concealed holster, stiffens up with the muzzle pointed at the ground. The only person who doesn’t listen is Sasha, who is coming towards Juno with menace in her eyes and a hand on the pistol at her belt.

Seeing her, Mick snaps his fingers and points at her. “Sasha, I said stop.”

She shakes her head. She’ll reach Juno in a few more steps. He prepares to spring back to Ruby and Arum, steels himself to fight his old friend.

“Sasha!” Mick repeats. “Stop right there!”

From the crowd, another voice: “Listen to him!”

Juno and Sasha whip around as one and spot her, together; Alessandra, pushing to the front of the CameramenTM and the cops alike. 

“Stay out of this-” Sasha begins.

Alessandra shouts her down. “What are you doing? What is this, Al? This is crazy! Don’t make it any worse!”

Understanding dawns on Juno, then, and nearly knocks him backwards off the podium. Alessandra’s fiancée- her wife. Not nice? Well, yeah, that much is true! Sasha got married without telling anyone? Ok, Juno did leave Mars and start dating a new guy without telling anyone, but his situation is a bit different- and Mick made mayor without telling Juno and apparently they’ve all just been keeping each other out of the loop rather than have the hard conversations.  
Shit, how did things get to this point? Martians and mayors and hijacking state-sanctioned murders.

“Ok,” Mick side-steps around Cassandra, who has got her mouth open so wide the sun must be drying her tongue out. “That’s it. That’s as far as any of this goes.”

“Step back.” says Sasha.

Mick strides up to her, past Juno without looking up, and snatches the gun right out of her hand. 

Sasha gasps at his nerve- actually gasps. “Give that back! You don’t know how to use it-”

By way of response, Mick hocks the gun into the crowd. A few CameramenTM shuffle out of the way and let it fall on the ground, skidding out of sight.

“Thank you!” Alessandra throws her hands skyward “Now will you please get off the stage, Sasha? Can we just go home?”

"Stop right there," says Min. Her confidence is remarkable for a woman whose press conference/execution was hijacked by a dragon, an Earthling with four arms and a short guy dressed like a cartoon character.

She stalks past said hijackers and plants herself in front of Mick.

“You’re not in charge here.” says Min.

Mick stares back at her evenly. “And you are?”

“Yes,” once again, she raises her gun. “I am.”

And she fires, aiming for Mick’s head.

(Jet, the other side of Hoosegow)

Shooting through a mesh floor at a moving target is never going to be an easy task, especially when one target is capable of breaking the land-speed record from a dead start. 

Diamond is far more interested in shooting at Nureyev than Jet. But Nureyev is fast and skinny and weaves instinctively, even when he is just jogging for exercise. Jet is a much larger, slower target, and Jet is the one who catches the bullet.

The laser smashes into the back of Jet’s left shoulder just before he makes it off the cat-walk. Nureyev has already reached the end and taken cover behind a pillar around which the stairs are wrapped. He sees the laser hit Jet and moves as if to help. This panics Jet- he has got to get over there before Nureyev can leave cover to help him. So Jet lets himself stumble, turning into a baseball-style slide that sees him through to safety and almost off the edge of the building. Nureyev snags him by the collar and drags him behind the pillar. 

“Let me look- don’t move, let me- alright. It’s not as bad as it could be. Just a burn.”

Diamond is still firing, waiting for one of them to make a break for it. If they were smarter or less angry, they would wait to lure them into a false sense of safety, or try coming to the bottom of the stairs and shoot up through the spiral. That the stairs aren’t also mesh is their small and only blessing.

To get Jet out of the way of Diamond’s inventive shooting patterns, Nureyev basically had to pull Jet into his lap. 108 kilos of dense Earthling muscle cannot be a good thing for a sufferer of a cystic disease to put on top of their body. But there’s very little cover on the platform- it’s bare except for this pillar, and the stairs that climb down to cling to the building as a fire-escape. If they can somehow make a laser-free window for themselves, they could make it down to the fire-escape in less than a minute.  
The barrage isn’t letting up, though, and the Panopticon has definitely seen them. In a few moments the situation is only going to get worse. 

“Weapons?”

“The rifle. Which I broke on their arm.”

Nureyev cusses, covering his head as another volley of lasers kicks plaster into the air. “Well, that just leaves our fists, doesn’t it? Fine. I’ll shred them with my teeth if I have to.”

Diamond yells up to them. “Come on down, boys! The longer this lasts the more pissed off I’m gonna get!”

“Whatever we do, under no circumstances is Diamond going to be allowed to walk away from us. I don’t care what we do- behead them, break their legs, plunge off a cliff with them. Juno doesn’t need to know they are even here.”

Jet squeezes his arm. “Nureyev, I know.”

His face softens. “You…who told you?”

“Buddy.”

“You’re just making this harder on yourselves!” continues Diamond.

“Ah, so they found the note in the vents.”

Ok, Jet doesn’t want to know the story behind that. “They’ve got to be reinforced or augmented or something. I don’t know what is going on with their body, but ordinary Earthlings can’t take falls like that without hurting something.”

“So what do we do?”

“What do you think this is made of?”

Nureyev stares at him. The barrage of lasers does not let up. 

Jet knocks a knuckle on the pillar. “Plaster? Concrete? It sounds like it’s just plaster. I’m guessing this wasn’t designed to hold that much weight. Most of it seems like it’s being held up by the rest of the building.”

“What are you getting at?”

Carefully, Jet stands, keeping his back flush with the pillar. “What I’m getting at is that Cecil Kanagawa thinks he’s got himself a new toy to play with. Rich boys like expensive toys. I won’t say that I’m a cheap toy, but I’ll eat Buddy’s prosthetic if they didn’t do more than sew my arm shut. Cover your ears and mouth.”

Now, Jet was never particularly blessed with physical strength. He has had to work for the body he has now- work to the point of bleeding callouses, blisters and soreness that could pin him to his bed for the day. The work paid off. By the time he was eighteen, in spite of the various poisons in his bloodstream, nobody could accuse little Jetty Sikuliaq of being weak by any Earthling standards. Up here in space, where everything is built a bit cheaper and the tallest person barely scrapes the underside of 7ft, a ‘strong’ Earthling becomes super-human.  
Jet finds a likely-looking fault near the top end of the pillar and, taking care not to bump Nureyev, smashes his elbow into it.

The fault widens to a crack. Briefly, Jet’s vision goes black. Never in his life has he hit a funny-bone so hard. But it is not broken. Jet is now sure that his elbow is no longer just bone. Is he going to pass out? No, no, he’s fine, the world has come back. 

Gritting his teeth, Jet drives his elbow into the widened crack. Pain ripples through his body along his bones. His skull rattles. Plaster dust explodes into the air. The pillar begins to groan under its own weight. Beneath him, the stairs and cat-walk rattle like shutters in a storm wind. Though his vision swims and spins Jet can see that the pillar has begun to lean outwards, poised to fall.  
Diamond stops firing at last. They seem to be yelling something. Jet can’t hear; his eardrums have come unanchored in their canals.

One more. Come on, Sikuliaq. 

The final blow is explosive in that it explodes the pillar the rest of the way outwards and that Jet’s soul seems to briefly explode from his body. Suddenly there are silver gates perched on clouds flashes before his eyes. A man who looks suspiciously like his mother’s icon of St Peter waves Jet forwards.

“I don’t this is where I’m supposed to be,” blurts Jet. “I’m agnostic.”

Then St Peter’s heavenly visage is replaced by Nureyev’s decidedly mortal one, haloed in plaster-dust and the Martian sun.

Nureyev has caught him and holds him in a kind of high dip, with the proper salsa posture and all. “Are you with me, Jet?”

“I- I hit my elbow so hard I saw heaven.”

“I’m surprised your soul didn’t crawl out of your nostrils.” Nureyev nods to the broken pillar. “You’ve got a bit of metal coming out of the end of your elbow. Don’t look at it, ok?”

Jet looks. A couple of weeks ago, that protrusion would have been bone.  
“Those bastards made me a cyborg!”

“Be mad about it later. Come on.”

There isn’t much time to spare, but Jet gets a look at the damage he and his mighty elbow caused as they descend the stairs.  
The ceiling of the Panopticon had to be built sturdy, of course, but there is sturdy and then there is indestructible. The pillar punched itself a cavity as deep as its own width but not yet fallen through. It lies in a trough of crack-frosted glass which is already expanding at the edges. In a moment, it’ll pop through the glass and into the Panopticon. Well, that’s going to cause some problems controlling the population of Hoosegow. 

Just when Jet is thinking that he might have actually crushed Diamond, he sees a flicker of movement at the edge of the sunken cracks. The hulk of Diamond moves in the thick sheets of dust and pulls themselves from the cracked side of the pillar. They have to wrench to get themselves free. It is a small comfort when Jet sees they have left degloved a lot of the skin on the arm that was hit by the pillar, because underneath that skin is plate after plate of un-scuffed metal. 

“Oh, for the love of god. Pakak, start running.”

Apparently, Diamond is indestructible.

(Vespa, the Kanagawa Fortress/Mansion)

Like everybody who has ever picked a lock, there was a time in Vespa’s life when she dreamed of being the first to break into the Kanagawa mansion. To what end? Who cares! Vespa would have been equally happy to have been sent in to smother the late Croesus Kanagawa in his sleep as she would have to just spills some gasoline on their plush carpets and destroy a few of their rich-people knickknacks. The point was to get into the house and remind the Kanagawas that, though they have an empire and several personal militias to protect it, they are not untouchable. 

Today, her old dream is being realized. In vastly different circumstances than she could have ever predicted or dreamed up.  
In her mind, this was always either a solo job or a heist she’d pull with her wife at her side. Instead, while Buddy is dressed up as a guard and kidnapping their friend back, Vespa is out in the full brunt of the Martian sun with a fanny-pack full of Martian, a slobbery animal of indeterminate species lashed to her back with a baby-sling and the buttocks of an immensely buff Earthling just above her head. This is what Vespa gets for volunteering to help! She could have stayed home with Rita and Soup, helping Rita run the mission remotely, helping Soup poke Legos up her nose or whatever it is that kids do, but no, Vespa just had to feel a responsibility to Jet and the Martians. 

When Ruby explained that she couldn’t really get to Jet nor Nureyev as strongly as she should have been able to because of some immense mass of psychic energy, Martian-like at that, Vespa sprang up to help. It was the Martian-ised settlers, for sure. Vespa had taken the Hippocratic Oath and couldn’t justify staying back when people, innocent or not, were being hurt, tormented, most definitely cut up for experimentation. Especially not after becoming so intimate with the consequences of that kind of torture.  
Cleaning out the Martian’s wounds was the most harrowing experience Vespa has ever had in her life, personal and professional. Her brain will never create anything to equal it, no matter how horrible the hallucinations get. The universe will never show her anything worse, not in this dimension or in a sub-dimension like Space-Hell.

Hence: the sun, the Martian in a fanny-pack, the Earthling butt cresting the wall just above her. 

Rita’s voice pipes up in her ear, through the same device that has been translating Earthling languages. “Yard’s empty. You guys should be good to jump down, just be careful of bear-traps.”

“Bear traps?” repeats Damien. He has gotten to the top of the wall and straddles it, waiting for Vespa to join him.

Once upon a time Vespa would have been able to scale this 10-meter wall with a hand behind her back and a guard hanging off her ankle. But she got old. And she has a fat vent-pug on her back, which is making things worse. The Martian’s weight is negligible because of the enchanted fanny-pack xey are in, which can both accommodate xer dimensions and somehow support xer weight without putting a strain on Vespa. Every now and then, the Martian unzips a corner of the pack with an appendage and tests the air, like the feeding limb of a bivalve testing water salinity.  
Of course xey were going to come along. According to Ruby, xey feel beholden to the settlers. Their transformations have come about as a side-effect of drinking the supplement derived from the Martian’s body. All it took was a psychic nudge from the Martian to trigger the transformation proper, so technically it is xer fault that the Kanagawas have a warehouse full of neo-Martians at their disposal. Serves them right. Sorta.

Ok, no, not really. It would be just desserts if it had only been the transformations that happened. The settlers earned the first part of what happened to them. Pleading ignorance isn’t enough in this case.

“Xey did it to help me,” Juno said, when the crew had at last found a moment to figure things out. “I think…Ruby, do I smell kind of Martian to you?”

“Oh, a little bit. It’s because of-”

“That eye I used to have. It’s gone, now, but one of my eyes kind of…kind of got possessed by ancient Martian technology. I bet it was contemporary to the guy we’ve got in that briefcase. That must have been why xey reached out to me in the first place, xey thought I was one of xer kind in disguise. Xey thought I would save xem.”

“You did.” said Ruby. “And you are Martian. Not the same species as me, or xem, but you’re definitely Martian.”

The only good thing to come of this entire thing is that the Martian secured xer escape and seems to be on the road to repair. Just a little while ago, they started to move again.  
The first time xey gave any indication that xey were ready to rejoin the conscious world, it was just as the crew were pulling into Utqiagvik, apologetically dropping off the wreckage of the Carte Blanche at a little space-port on the outskirts of the town. Rita was just explaining the swiss-cheese hull as a consequence of their forced-boarding when a tentacle crept out from the hinges of the briefcase, which Rita was wearing like a back-pack, and took the glasses off her face. Rita screamed. The mechanics screamed. There was a lot of screaming and a lot of scurrying as Rita tried to figure out what was happening, and they would have been stuck in that loop for a while had Talfryn not snagged Rita by the collar and separated her from the briefcase. 

Hysteria changed to wonder. Hey! The Martian was moving around! Finally, a positive development!

Vespa was summoned from a nap in the night-shift’s bunkroom to give the Martian a check-up, which amounted to gently dumping them onto a desk-top and checking the old wound sites with a tongue depressor. New limbs had grown in the place of the stumps, and fresh, tender flesh filled places that were craters before. There were not even scars to prove the Martian had been tortured at all. Physical scars at least- Vespa doesn’t know a thing about how Martians process or experience trauma, but if it’s even a fraction like the human experience of it, the Martian’s mind is a piece of scar tissue.  
At least xey got to change xer shell from the dented briefcase where they’d putrefied and suffered for upwards of a decade into the relative comfort of an enchanted fanny-pack, borrowed from Utqiagvik. 

“Bear traps!” repeats Rita. “Kanagawas spread ‘em out when they ain’t got that many people in th’ house ta defend it. Don’t’cha worry, though, Mr Damien, I’ll steer ya around ‘em. There ain’t that many anyway. You’d have ta been a royal idiot ta try breakin’ inta this place. Idiots like us!”

At the top of the wall, Vespa pauses to catch her breath and adjust the knots holding Guapo in place.  
If things are on schedule, Juno, Ruby and Arum will be harassing the Kanagawas right now, while Jet and Buddy check under Hoosegow’s couches and call into the vents for Nureyev. Things could break bad or get weird very quickly, so the sooner Vespa and Damien can get their part of the rescue mission done, the better. 

“I can’t believe it’s just a barbed wire fence and a bit of brick wall between this place and the outside world.” Damien remarks “And that they would leave the place unguarded.”

“It’s guarded by their reputation. Breaking into the Kanagawa residence is basically like locking yourself out on a spaceship a leaky EVA suit. It’s a bad idea from start to finish and your ass is bound to end up sucked into the vacuum of space. These traps are probably out more for Cecil’s amusement than for any practical reason.”

Rita chimes in. “I told’ja it’d be empty! Not ‘a one of them guards is here. They’re all down at Hoosegow tryin’ to keep Mr Jet on the gallows.”

“Did they put him on gallows? I thought it was a lethal injection.”

“I mean th’ metaphorical gallows- oh, ok, so, step down a little bit to the left an’ be careful ‘a that ficus. It’s got a bear-trap an’ some kinda blow-dart contraption.”

Damien blazes the trail, stepping over concealed bear-traps and switches for flame-throwers hidden in the hedge. Vespa follows his footprints along. She nearly eats grass and fire a couple of times because of how much bigger Damien’s stride is than her; as she is coming up to the relative safety of the front steps, Guapo shifts, throwing her balance off. Damien catches her by the arm and tugs her to safety. A second later, a spear erupts from the soil and skewers the spot Vespa has just vacated.

“They wanna play it like that? Fine!”

Bracing herself against Damien, she seizes the spear and pulls up with all of her might. After a moment of straining that is embarrassing for everyone, the Martian takes pity, slithers an arm out of the fanny pack and wrenches the spear out of its buried mechanism. Vespa accepts the spear.

“Why in God’s name do they have a fishing spear in their yard?”

“Thoughtless collection of antique tools that remove ‘em from their original context an’ thereby commodify th’ culture they come from. You gonna keep that, Mrs Vespa?”

Vespa wipes the sweat from her brow. “Damn skippy. How do we get in, Rita?”

“Well you guys are still alone outside, but I can see a few heat signatures movin’ around inside. It’s gotta be some CameramenTM, ‘cos the Kanagawas train all their service staff like super-soldiers anyway, so they all gotta be out at the- oh, Mistah Damien, you better not go to the front door! Looks like they got a- yep, that’s a trapdoor an’ a spike pit at the bottom.”

Rita advises that the safest route is via a ground-floor window, accessible by a series of covered walkways that wrap around the house like a porch and eventually into a mossy, tree-lined courtyard. No traps here, otherwise the Kanagawa guards would spend most of their days digging each other out of spike pits or unpinning each other from walls. 

Rita doesn’t say a word about what security cameras are trained on them; she hacked them a few hours ago and is playing a compilation of old footage. It is a bit of a sloppy job because you can see a few times where she made the edits, and once or twice a guard wanders by the edge of the frame. Vespa would be surprised if anyone is watching the feeds- especially when the alternative is the Unnatural Disaster’s charade execution. 

When they arrive at the window Rita identifies, it quickly becomes apparent that Vespa is going to have to go first. The panel of the window that is open is only about as big as a mail-slot. Damien wouldn’t be able to get even a calf through.

Untying Guapo from her back, Vespa pops him through first. Guapo oozes over the edge, his pudgy legs pedaling in the air. He splats out of sight onto what sounds like carpet.

“You ok?”

A wet noise of affirmation. She hands the fanny-pack over to Damien and squeezes in, using his bent knee as a stepladder. 

“It should be a bathroom.” says Rita. 

Picking herself up off a cashmere shower-mat, Vespa opens the bigger window for Damien and helps him through. “It is. Hey, don’t eat that!”

“Sorry! I didn’t now ya could hear me, Mrs Vespa, I’ll stop-”

“Not you, Rita. Guapo’s eating the damn soap. Hey- drop it, that’s not food.”

When it comes to wealthy houses, there is opulence, and then there is obscenity. The Kanagawa mansion is so obscene it is kind of hard to look at. Everything that could possibly have been fashioned from marble is; every surface is draped with expensive fabrics, or hung with works of art, pieces of the late Croesus’ collection of masks and various cultural artefacts from the universe over. Their footsteps would echo across the walls if it weren’t for the ankle-deep, plush carpeting.  
Vespa smears as much dirt as she can onto this carpeting. Guapo is also leaving his moist snail’s trail on everything he touches, so Vespa encourages him to poke and prod everything his various tendrils can reach. 

Rita guides them through this gold-plated labyrinth, once or twice urging them out of sight as one of the CameramenTM comes close. The CameramenTM don’t seem to be following any obvious patrol routes. They are just kind of wandering among the rooms, aimless and, when Vespa and Damien catch a glimpse of one’s face passing by their hiding spot behind an Iron Maiden.  
Vespa can’t blame them for looking so miserable. Biologically, they are abominations, confined to this mansion as servants and grunts to the tyrants that populate it. That CameramanTM that pursued them through Space Hell…was it afraid to do so? When they passed over that great pile of CameramenTM detritus, did they grieve? 

“Ok, the turn on your left is gonna be ol’ Croesus’s office. From there you’n get to the warehouse where all the settlers are bein’ kept if you can find, uh, a bust, a statue or somethin’, that’s got the switch on it somewhere. The passage should open up in th’ Iron Maiden.”

Croesus Kanagawa’s office is covered in a light film of dust. It has been something like four or five years since the Kanagawas’ daughter killed him and, going by the stillness of the room, the last people who set foot in the place were the crime-scene cleaners. Is this meant to be a shrine to the old man or a way of forgetting that he ever existed? 

Their boots raise dust from the carpet as they search for the bust Rita mentioned. Croesus’ collection is so expansive that it crowds up the office-space, which is as big as a studio apartment to begin with. 

“Who was this man? And why did he have so many masks? There are medicine masks next to prayer masks next to performance masks…” Damien shakes his head. “And all of these fertility statues next to, what is that, an Iron Maiden? Was he trying to conceive with the damn thing?”

“Oh, I think we need to walk through that. It’ll take us to the basement if I can figure out where the damn bust is. Who is it of, Rita?”

“Dunno! There’s only one listed in the room, though, so you don’t hafta guess.”

While Damien goes around listing the Earth cultures that have been robbed to make up the mask collection and Guapo tries to eat a parashu, Vespa hunts. She handles these ancient artefacts of war with a lot less care than she should, flinging shields and knives out of her way, knocking into a display rack of spears and tritons, which she then dumps on the floor to check if the bust is lurking behind it.  
It turns out to be behind a huge display of maces and flails that have been stood up in a kind of massive coat-of-arms, arrayed around a viciously spiked shield. The remains of drag-marks are gouged into the carpet from the shield to the legs of Croesus’s dusty desk, suggesting that the desk and shield swapped places at some point. Croesus must have sat in front of this display until a rouge stroke of common sense made him realize that it wasn’t smart to have so many weapons at his back.

Honestly, Vespa is surprised that Cassandra managed to kill her dad at all. With half of his collection being ancient bits of torture equipment, you’d think Croesus would have tripped and skewered himself on a Turkish turban-helmet a long time ago. 

“Oh, for the love of god. This bust is of himself.”

Rita laughs. “I guess th’ guy knew what he liked!”

After a few minutes of tweaking the marble Croesus’s face, Vespa discovers the switch is concealed in the nostrils and has to give the bust’s nose a good picking to get the Iron Maiden to open. The hinges groan in complaint. A few of the spikes drop out of the interior the minute the machine begins moving, like teeth falling out of a rotten mouth. Good thing, though, because these gaps means there is just enough space for Vespa, Damien and Guapo to pile into the torture suit at the same time. Vespa doesn’t relish the idea of being shut up in this Iron Maiden-elevator to an unknown dungeon alone. 

For a few long moments they have to spoon upright, bumping down through untold levels of the manor by the light of a bulb that barely cuts through the gloom.

“So,” Vespa says into the left of Damien’s monumental pecs. “How did you meet Arum and Rilla?”

The Iron Maiden opens at last on what looks like a combination between an underground railroad station and the aftermath of an explosion in a factory that produced only torture implements. Vespa considers climbing back into the Iron Maiden, but Guapo potters out and sets about trying to eat- what is that, a camera? A TV camera? Aw, shit.

“Rita, where are we?”

“Yer in the basement, Mrs Vespa. You’re gonna wanna take th’ turn that’s the farthest down on the right, there.”

“There’s a film set down here. Like, there’s a film set. I- Damien, I’m not seeing things, am I?”

He shakes his head. “She’s right, Rita. The passages are here, but…it looks like someone is setting up to film a, uh, well, I don’t know what kind of show you’d make out of aiming a camera at a chair with buzz-saws attached to it.”

Rita’s gasp almost blows their eardrums out. “Oh, dunk! Oh dunk oh dangit oh- nothing, Soup, everything’s fine! Just, uh- you guys need to start running.”

Dread knots in Vespa’s stomach. What kind of a show would you make with a buzz-saw chair? Only the pilot of the second season of the Kanagawas’ most successful game-show to date!

“Which way do we run, Rita?”

“Last on the right! Like I said! Aw, Mrs Vespa, you better go, the heat sensors can’t read through all the floors! I don’t know if you guys are alone.”

They aren’t. Before the first syllable of the first maniacal chuckle, Vespa can feel him in the room. Before he ducks out from behind a huge camera and sends Guapo scuttling behind her legs, Vespa can smell the nasty little man and the nasty little menace he radiates.

Cecil grins and waggles his fingers. Behind him, a lone CameramanTM has got their arms crossed in a posture that looks remarkably like a little-league coach watching their team lose the last match of the season.

“Well, hello, hello, intruders! I don’t know if we’ve ever had anyone break in before.”

Vespa draws her knife and assumes a stance that makes it clear she would love nothing more than to puncture Cecil’s lungs.

But he is not interested in her, nor in Damien.

His face has quickly changed from that of a predator to that of a man who has just realized he is trapped in a small space with an angry raccoon.

He points at Guapo, who cowers and hisses wetly. “How did…how did you get back in here? I thought I threw you away.”

(Juno)

Min shouldn’t have expected to actually hit Mick. No doubt, she expects one of the interlopers to get in the way of her bullet as well, by dragon-wing, a body slam, by offering themselves up as a shield. Shooting at the mayor is just an affirmation of the power that everybody already knows she possesses. An affirmation that cannot be taken back nor softened. Letting the puppets glance up at their masters to remind them of their strings. 

Min shoots to make a point. 

Surely, though, Min does not expect to hit her stepdaughter.

Cassandra’s body fills the space between Mick’s and the laser with a second to spare. The laser smashes into Cassandra’s chest and propels her back into Mick’s arms. Red mist sprays into the air as Cassandra’s flesh is scorched away, her ribs opened to the sun. Her head goes slack against Mick’s shoulders. Her eyes have gone glassy. One of them reddens from a popped vessel.

Letting out a wordless scream, Min flings her gun away. 

Beneath him, Juno’s legs quake. Arum catches him about the waist and brings him to the stage before Juno can finish falling over. Seeing Juno’s ashen face is all Arum needs to understand the situation. He tucks Juno’s head beneath his chin, retreating to the cover of Ruby’s tented wings. Mantling over Juno like a hawk over his nest. 

“It’s the same spot.” Juno mutters into Arum’s chest. He isn’t sure if that is right, actually. It just feels right to say. “It’s the same spot. Benten- the same spot on Benten.”

At the same time, he makes himself look. He makes himself twist back and confront the great red wound in Cassandra’s chest.  
Mick has got her laid out on the ground. He’s ripping off his jacket and pressing it to the wound, as if that will do any good. Sasha has forgotten Juno for the moment and is kneeling beside him. Alessandra, too, mounts the stage and comes to her wife’s side, to Cassandra’s side. As far as Juno knows Alessandra has never laid eyes on Cassandra in real life before, but she pillows the other woman’s head on her knees and clasps her hand anyway, because there is no such thing as a stranger when you are about to die.

Somewhere past the screen of Ruby’s wings, Min has begun crying. 

“Let me-I have to.”

Arum helps him stand. That is all Juno needs. Though it is much, much harder this time, Juno makes himself do what he did on The Platonium. He seizes the fear by its throat and shoves it into the back of his mind. He makes his shaking legs move and makes them carry him to Cassandra. Cassandra was his friend, once. Sort of a friend. Sort of an enemy. Sort of a lot of things, but the point is Juno knew her, once, and helped put her into Hoosegow for a patricide she probably wasn’t aware of committing until she’d finished it, and Juno never tried to readdress that long because looking back isn’t a thing Juno Steel has ever been good at.

Sasha moves to make room for him. He kneels in the expanding pool of blood and clasps Cassandra’s slippery hand, which he holds close to his chest.

“Cass.”

“Juno?”

“Yeah, Cass. I’m here.”

Silently, Sasha is pulling Mick’s hands away from the fruitless compression. It will just hurt her more if he keeps at it. There is no point. 

“Did she…she hit him?”

As if summoned, Min appears on the other side of Cassandra’s body.

Min cups her stepdaughter’s face and turns Cassandra to face her. “Baby? Look at me. Look at me. Don’t shut your eyes. Look at me.”

She might as well not be there. Cassandra’s eyes are already fixed on some distant point in the sunburnt sky. A thousand-yard stare that penetrates into the belly of heaven. 

Juno’s eye stings. “No, Cass. You saved him. Mick is right here.”

By now, Mick has let go of her. Juno takes Mick’s hand and presses him to Cassandra’s.

“Here he is, Cass. He’s fine.”

“I am,” Mick’s voice doesn’t waver. He looks straight across into Min’s eyes. “You stopped her. Thank you.”

Min tries again to call Cassandra back to her. “Cassie, baby, please look at me. Please. You have to stay with me. You have to stay with me and your brother.”

Cassandra cannot hear her or choses not to. 

“I told Jet,” blood bubbles at her lips. “I told him that someone was coming…Jet…I was fucking with him… didn’t think you’d be dumb enough to…come for real.”

“I am that dumb.”

“I just…I just fucked with ev…everybody. That’s all…I just- fucked with people and- and I didn’t ever do a good thing, Juno. I was never a good person. I want to- to be, but… I was a bad sister. I was a bad da…do..do I go…even if I’m goy…do I go to-to the same place as your brother?”

“Yes. If you want to.” 

He doesn’t want to take her away from Mick or Alessandra, so he cups the other side of her face, his thumb meeting Min’s beneath Cassandra’s bloody chin.

The open cavity of her chest twitches and heaves with the effort of speaking.

“I…want to…”

“Cassandra. Cassandra, please.”

“I want…”

The transition from life into death looks like many things.

Like bitter acceptance at the end of a long struggle. Like recognizing an old friend, enemy, lover, a person who fell out of the center of the world a long time ago but still occupies a piece of your heart. Like being taken by surprise, seized by the neck from behind by a power you didn’t know to fear. Like the relief of seeing the square lights of your home in the dark distance sooner than you expected to.

It is this last kind which carries Cassandra from them. When she goes, she goes looking at someone she has wanted to see for a long time. 

(Jet)

They are two stories down the fire-escape when Diamond lurches into view at the edge of the roof, howling. They’ve got a back full of glass shards and an undamaged gun clutched in one hand.

“Ya’allah! What are they made of?” Nureyev flattens himself against the wall. A laser narrowly misses bisecting his stomach. 

“I’m betting most of them is like that.”

The low spires of the necropolis literally in sight. Just across a rocky kilometer of blasted red soil. Jet could probably cover that in five minutes if he ran hard. Nureyev could do it in two.

“If I hold them off…” Jet begins.

“Shut your mouth.” finishes Nureyev.

Diamond’s heavy footsteps shake the stairs. They are coming down, firing as they go. 

“But-”

“Stop it. No. We’re getting out of this together or not at all. I followed you in, I’ll follow you out.”

“Fuck.” says Jet.

“Indeed.” Nureyev nods along the wall to a fire-door. “Back inside? I don’t think we have another choice.”

They don’t. Diamond hears the door opening and shouts that they had better not try to run again. There is some strange kind of reverb effect on their voice- a sound like metal encroaching on the vocal cords. Maybe Jet did hurt them worse than he thought. 

Back into Hoosegow. The cells are empty, as are the offices, the interrogation rooms, the rec rooms and the bathrooms. The basic strategy is to just go as far as they can, down the prison, and hope that they lose Diamond in Hoosegow, then they’ll risk the desert. Just from the way that Diamond bursts in after them, Jet knows they aren’t going to be able lose Diamond. 

“We need to get out of the main passages.” says Nureyev.

They have crossed an entire floor without seeing nor hearing a hint of any other person- except for Diamond staying on their trail. Jet is taking all kinds of stupid turns and doubling back and they refuse to be shaken.

“I don’t know that it matters, Pakak. I think I’ve got a GPS in this damned arm.”

Catching his breath on a railing, Nureyev grimaces.” Let’s at least get as much of a head start as we can manage. I admit I’m feeling a bit faint.”

“Can you keep going?”

“Oh, sure, but don’t be surprised if I pass out the minute we reach the rendezvous point. Where the hell is Buddy, by the way?”

Jet shrugs. “Outside? She read the text. I assume she assumes we can take care of ourselves.”

“We can! I would hope that we’re not the first ones there, is all. I’ll have to lay down as soon as we stop moving and I may not be able to get up again.”

Jet wants to make Nureyev elaborate if he is threatening to go into multiple organ failure, but there is a sound on the stairwell, a cry of wordless rage, and that gets them moving again. Picking a door at random, Nureyev seizes Jet and drags him off, then promptly swings Jet in front of him, siccing him like an attack dog on the guard that appears in front of them.  
The guard is as surprised by Jet as Jet is by her. But he’s faster and so she is the one who gets laid out with a right-hook. The blow knocks her sprawling and rolls her a few meters down the hall. Apparently, Jet and Nureyev have chosen to hide in the only other occupied place in Hoosegow; the minute the guard drops unconscious, there is a chorus of jeers and a thunder of applause on the bars.

High-pitched jeers. Little hands.

“Am I exceptionally blind,” says Nureyev at his elbow. “Or are those inmates children?”

“You’re blind!” yells what is definitely a pre-teen in a cuffed inmates’ jumpsuit. 

That there is a juvenile wing in Hoosegow is shocking, of course, but what causes Jet to do a double-take is that he recognizes some of these kids.  
Jet makes a quick lap of the wing, counting sixteen children paired up in eight cells. Their ages range from the plumpness of immediate post-toddlerhood to the gangly awkwardness of the middling teenage years. Not one of these inmates would be able to get into a mature-rated movie on their own, that is for sure. 

“Pakak, these are the cul- uh, the children of The Platonium.”

Nureyev pinches the bridge of his nose. “Ya’allah. Alright, I suppose we’re adding a prison break to our list of errands.”

One of the older girls points at Jet. “I know you! You guys moved in just before everybody blobbed!”

She elbows her cell-mate in apparent triumph. “I toldja we’d seen him before!”

“That was an actor, dumb-ass.”

“Yeah but the actor kind of looked like him.”

“He did not-” priorities, Sikuliaq. Do not fight with the children over the way the media presents you. “Besides the point, how did you get here?”

The answers come thick and fast.

“They took us from The Platonium before it blew up-”

“-‘cos we were too young to drink the stuff. I mean, most ‘a us-”

“-I poured that nasty stuff down the sink every time Mom brought it to me-”

From what Jet can glean, these children have been weeded out from the larger crop of settlers because they haven’t showed any signs of transformation. Which has probably rendered them valueless to the Kanagawas and Dark Matters, except for future tests…

“You,” Jet points to the oldest of the children, the one who recognized him. “What’s your name?”

“Hawk-Eagle.”

“Pardon?” says Nureyev. 

“Hawk-Eagle.”

Nureyev has the presence of mind, at least, to stifle his laugh with a fist. “Just checking that I heard you correctly. Wonderful name. Noble.”

“Why aren’t you with the rest of the prison in the Panopticon?”

She exchanges a look with her cellmate. “Uh, because we’re kids? Duh.”

Diamond is still not far behind. Jet has got to figure this out quickly. 

He gestures to the guard, still stretched out on the ground. “And that was your only guard?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright. We can’t bring you with us because it would only put you in more danger-”

“Go with you?” Hawk-Eagle cellmate has come up to the bars too. “Go with a stranger? No way, dude! I’ve seen after-school specials before. You guys will eat us or harvest our organs or something. Just give us the keys. We’ll let ourselves out. There’s a big media circus right outside, yeah? We’ll just show up there and tell the whole universe about how we got kidnapped and put in jail.”

“That sounds like a good idea considering our, uh, unfortunate circumstances. Let’s see if she had the keys.”  
While Nureyev is looting her pockets, he checks her pulse and announces that she will be coming around at any moment. Jet springs Hawk-Eagle first and lets her free the rest of them. 

Leaving them does not feel right. Nor does bringing them along. None of this feels right- children shouldn’t be anywhere near Hoosegow, nor the type of violence that Diamond threatens. And yet, Jet cannot think of what else to do. Leaving the children to their own devices is not good, but what is the alternative? Herding them out to the Necropolis and spiriting them away to Earth? 

“We have to go. If a gigantic Earthling bursts through that door, just get out of their way, they’re after us.”

Hawk-Eagle laughs and scoops up one of the toddlers. “You guys sound busy.”

God, this is so, so, so wrong, that is a seventeen-year-old on the verge of shock picking up a toddler. For perhaps the second time that day, Jet finds himself praying. Apparently this is going to become a habit.  
Jet forces himself to leave without looking back. 

As they exit the wing and head to the ground floor, at last, Nureyev passes Jet a fairly basic firearm. 

“Here. I can’t see well enough to be sure of hitting anything.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Jet, I’m sure. Do you want me to shoot you instead of Diamond?”

“No.”

“Because I will. I’ll do it now just for fun.” 

His spirits are high but he has begun to look so, so sick. Jet is surprised he can still move. There is a benefit to being pumped full of cocktails of painkillers.  
Without discussion, Jet and Nureyev end up back at the fire exit. The red desert is just outside and the necropolis beyond it. This may be their only chance. 

“I can’t hear them anymore.”

Jet glances back the way they have come. They are still alone.

“What do you think? Should we try for it?”

“They might be waiting a level above us. They could start shooting the minute we’re out in the open.”

“Or they could come around the corner any minute.”

“Let me go first. If we’re not shot at, go ahead and over-take me. I’ll be right behind you.”

Nureyev scowls. “Stop trying to die for me.”

“You’re faster than me, Pakak, it’s just logical.”

“If I think for a moment that you’re going to pull some self-sacrificing bullshit-”

Jet opens the door and steps out into the heat. Behind him, Nureyev continues. 

“I’ll double-back and murder you myself-”

Nothing happens. 

“- think I won’t, then you’ve seriously underestimated how petty I am willing to be-”

Gently, Jet guides Nureyev in front of him and nudges him between the shoulder blades.

Together, they run into the oppressive heat of the Martian desert. 

(Juno)

Death settles over her eyes in a film and her skin in a pallor. Cassandra’s body seems to shrink the moment the life leaves it, even more so as her stepmother lays her head on Cassandra’s ruined chest, keening. Feeling an intruder on this moment of surprising (performative?) grief, Juno gets up. He is quickly joined by Sasha and Mick. Gently, Alessandra slides out from under the body and surrenders her, it, to Min, who clasps her stepdaughter messily to her. 

Nausea threatens to overwhelm him. He gropes for something to lean on, finding Mick’s shoulder. 

Suddenly, it is like a switch has been flicked. Everything stills. Or perhaps it has been still from the moment Cassandra was shot and Juno is just now realizing it because Mick has got him.  
There is a moment of quiet at last. Juno embraces his old friend and breathes him in. He smells of the mayoral office, which threatens to panic him, but he also smells of Mick, of the city smog and sweat, which wins out and calms him. Home. Both of the places they come from, that haunted office and that scorched city that is always on the verge of sloughing off in the red sand in impoverished chunks, both of those places are home.  
Hyperion City is home and it is horrible and Juno is so glad to be back.

Over Mick’s shoulder, he meets Sasha’s eyes. She doesn’t look away. 

She opens her mouth to speak, but Min interrupts. 

She calls out, broken but firm. “Captain Khan. Place Juno under arrest for the murder of Kanagawa Cassandra.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some pronouns for the Martian! Apparently the closest thing to xer experience of gender is xe/xem. I thought about going more in depth about the Martian gender system and why it makes sense that Ruby thinks of herself as a she/her, but frankly, I’m the kind of non-binary that thought gender was a joke for a few years, and from a culture that traditionally just observed a male/female binary. So I don’t really consider myself an expert on #gender-systems because, as I said, I have been so far outside of feeling that system from birth that I thought it was a joke and have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that people genuinely identify with it, so…I mean y’all are valid but God just didn’t put the ‘gender’ part in my brain so I’ll stay in my lane, which is to say, I'm canoeing down the river which is adjacent to the high-way.
> 
> Anyway, I wonder where Buddy is?


	23. NOT A CHAPTER

Hey all! Not a chapter, sorry to disappoint! Just a quick notice: as it stands, we've got two more chapters left. First, the whopper of the ending and then a little epilogue. I could, concievably, missing sleep and sacrificing sanity, bang those two out and have them posted on time, but I think they'll turn out better if I take a little bit more time on them. 

The final chapter and the epilogue will go up at the same time. Shouldn't be more than another week or five days. I'm determined to get this finished before my university semester begins next week, though, so y'all won't be waiting to long. Thanks for your patience! Everybody stay safe and/or healthy!


	24. Chapter 23: The End of the End, Homerun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: Strong language throughout, everybody gets to say ‘fuck’ in this one, extended episode of anaphylaxis, constricted airways, acceptance of death, wounds from glass, large prison interrment camp referenced/not described in great detail, internal bleeding, character experiencing end-stages of chronic illness, vomiting blood, impact injuries, large bruises from internal bleeding, decapitation, fighting, fighting an opponent a lot stronger/bigger, night-sticks, beatings, police presence, 'rioting', reference to incarcerated children, grieving, dead bodies in public, references to medical debt/enslavement, use of weapons like spears and arrows, amputation without anaesthetic, reference to culturally enforced ableism, reference to ableism against specifically ADHD, mentions of chronic pain, character phobic of blood exposed to blood, publically broadcast murder/death
> 
> Suggested listening: Temper Trap, 'Lost'
> 
> Take this one in chunks, y'all. It's 46 goddamned pages long. Here we go.

(Vespa)

It has been a long time since Vespa has gone into the kind of rage that blanks her vision out. The kind of rage that pops coherent thought and common sense out of the driver’s seat and urges the mind to swerve through as many lanes of traffic as possible. For a person with a psychosis disorder, strong emotions can be a trigger and the last thing that Vespa needs is to trigger herself when she is also fighting. 

But! This man, this nasty little homunculus wrapped in velvet and privilege, has just insulted Vespa’s animal companion, and Vespa has got a knife. If ever there were a situation in which she could justify triggering herself…

Sensing what she is about to do, Damien grabs Vespa by the arm before she can even lower herself into a posture appropriate for springing at a throat. But Vespa is determined. Her boots squeak in place on the floor. Behind her, Damien strains audibly and clasps her other arm. Vespa presses on undeterred, although her arms are being pinned back like the wings of a bird about to take flight. That Cecil is completely unconcerned with this earnest attempt on his life and stands casually, safely behind his enormous CameramanTM only makes Vespa angrier. 

“Ms Vespa?” says Rita. “Ms Vespa, what’s goin’ on? Why’s it sound like you’re on a basketball court?”

“Cecil threw him away!” she snarls.

“Mistah Damien?”

Somehow, Vespa has gotten the advantage and is dragging Damien forwards centimetre by hard-won centimetre.   
“I don’t know what’s going on! I think- the garbage disposal dog was abandoned or abused in some way by this nasty little man who lives in the basement?”

Cecil seems to think Damien is narrating the situation for himself and jumps in to provide context. “I created that…well, I’m going to be honest, I forgot what I put into its genes. A bit of goat and shark to make sure that he’d eat what I needed him to eat, but he came out…he came out looking like raw offal and a demon rolled into one.”

Veins strain fit to burst in Vespa’s in forehead. “He’s FLAWLESS!”

Cecil’s lip curls. “It’s ugly! It’s hideous! It did its job, it sucked up the trash it needed to, but- look at it! I could only use it for a month it was just- eugh! Oka-san stopped coming near my lab because it grossed her out so much. We had to do to it what we did to Uncle Joe- just, put him out in the woods and hope that exposure would take care of it! Incidentally, that didn’t work on Uncle Joe, either, but I filled up my dumping spot in Space-Hell, so what else was I supposed to do?”

Vespa seriously considers rolling out of her hiding spot. She has got a knife. If nothing else, she has got a fanny-pack with a strap the right size to ring Cecil’s stupid smug neck. The Martian won’t begrudge her that, surely.

“Aw, get ‘em, Ms Vespa, get his ass! You put your foot right down Cecil’s throat!”

“No!” snaps Damien. “That is quite enough of that! Calm down.”

With a tremendous effort, Damien drags Vespa backwards and manages to get an arm around her waist. Her feet come suddenly off of the ground, pointing her towards the ceiling like a figurehead on a ship’s prow. Vespa makes a high-pitched noise that isn’t entirely mammalian. 

“You’ve got their captive on your waist!” he hisses into her ear. 

With a pang of guilt, Vespa sags in his arms. She was so ready to beat ass she forgot about the fugitive patient in her fanny-pack. Damien is permitted to drag Vespa several metres back to a safer distance, Guapo slithering at his heels. 

Cecil doesn’t understand why they’ve retreated. Naturally, he assumes it is the threat posed by the giant bear-crocodile concoction he has got with him.

He pats the creature’s huge forearm with a possessive fondness. “You’re right to be afraid. They’re one of the more powerful CameramenTM I ever put together, my Juno-”

“Juno?!” echo the intruders with equal shrillness. Guapo emits a gurgle that sounds a bit like the name. Rita, for her part, shrieks it so loudly that she startles Soup out of the room.

The CameramanTM seems to roll their lens-eye as Cecil thumps them on the shoulder, nudging them forwards. “Yes! Their name is Juno! Why is everyone freaking out about that today? Can’t a man celebrate a friend?”

“What’s going on?” Rita is still whispering. She hasn’t realized that her voice isn’t nearly loud enough to carry from the device. 

“Cecil is here, complicating the situation. He’s right in our way.” Vespa mumbles this out of the corner of her mouth, but Cecil hears anyway. 

“Are you talking to that thing? It’s not sentient, you know.”

She bristles. “His name is Guapo and he’s sentient enough to be afraid of you!”

“Everything is afraid of me. Speaking of fear, though, can we talk about that shade of green you put in your hair? You look like a venomous animal warning predators off.”

“Look,” says Damien. “We don’t want any trouble. I- well, she does, but I don’t, and I’m sure I can persuade her that she doesn’t really want trouble when she considers what else is on the line-”

“Are you here to save the Unnatural Disaster?”

“Hol’ on.” Rita’s fingers clack on a keyboard. “I’m gonna see if I can squeeze into their house’s AI. It might get us caught, but I gotta see if he’s standin’ over a trap door or something we can use. Keep him talking.”

Meanwhile, Vespa tries to formulate a response to Cecil’s question that won’t implicate them. Would he believe that they just happen to be here to commit a separate crime? Because it’s true, but admitting to that will compromise their chances of getting at the Worth a shot.

Mustering as much confidence as she can past the seething anger and the creeping realisation that hers, Damien’s and the settlers’ goose may have just been cooked by this nasty little man and his Dr Moreau-looking bodyguard, Vespa says: “Who, Jet Sikuliaq? No. I’ve never even met the guy.” 

Come on, Rita, do something!

Vespa can only continue to stall with blither. “I mean, you bump into each other when you’re running in the same criminal circles for a long time, so I kind of met him, but the way you meet someone when you take the same commute every day, you know?”

He cocks a pale eyebrow. “Did you? Take the same commute?”

“I- no, I just, you know, knew what he looked like, because he’s monolithic and has great hair and- why am I defending myself to you? Look!” Vespa stoops and scoops up Guapo, both to comfort him and conceal the fanny-pack with his damp girth. “Look! I’m not here to save that guy. I don’t even know that guy! My, uh, buddy, and I, we just thought that we’d take a crack at the Kanagawa household while all of their security was out guarding Hoosegow.”

Before Cecil can respond, the groaning report of a seldom-used mechanism echoes around the basement. There is a solid ten seconds of awkward silence as a metre-by-metre wide section of the floor retracts in on itself, a few paces to Cecil’s left. 

“Did I get ‘em?” exclaims Rita.

“Nope.” Vespa whispers back.

Cecil has finally caught on and is utterly scandalised by how long these two intruders have distracted him. “You just tried to kill me! Juno, they just tried to kill me! What are you going to do about that, huh?”

The CameramanTM seems to sigh, squares its shoulders and stalks towards them.

“Frick,” Rita thumps on the keyboard. “You guys better start runnin’.”

“What, into the damn thing’s arms?”

“I don’t know what ta tell ya, Ms Vespa, except that yer skinny an’ fast and if ya sweat hard enough you’re gonna be slippery enough to squirt outta the monster’s arms! We’re runnin’ outta time!”

“Great advice, Rita.”

“Who the hell is Rita? Juno, kill the green one first. She’s taking to herself and it’s starting to freak me out.”

Tucking Guapo’s head beneath her chin, Vespa bounces on her heels as if she is about to retreat. She also glances back at Damien to see if they are on the same page. He nods, drawing one of his husband’s knives from a deep sleeve. 

Even as she tries to come across as definitely afraid of Cecil, Vespa cannot help but snarl at him. “I wasn’t talking to myself- that time. Excuse me if my psychosis makes you feel uncomfortable!”

And then, letting out a ferocious yell which is quickly joined by Guapo’s own gargling imitation, she charges the CameramanTM. 

(Jet)

What little worry Jet had about not knowing for sure if Diamond chased after them is quickly dashed. They definitely hear Diamond coming out after them. In spite of the small fire-fight that has been going on behind them for a good ten minutes now, Diamond’s voice carries easily over the sound and pings off columns of rock and sand.

“What did they say?” says Nureyev. 

“Something about veins?”

“That they were going to-”

“Wear ours as a necklace, yes, I think so.”

Nor is Diamond’s progress after them difficult to gauge. The sound of their boots on the loose soil reminds Jet of the time he watched one of the pest-ostriches of Io climb on top of a taxi and stomp it to shreds. What the hell has Diamond got in their bones to be making that shredded-metal sound?   
Immobilising or killing Diamond is probably going to require dropping them off a cliff. Maybe decapitation.

He says as much to Nureyev.

“What?” Nureyev yells back.

“I said we’re going to have to cut their head off!”

“With what?”

“I don’t know!”

“Look, you hold them down, and I’ll gnaw through their jugular! These teeth aren’t decorative, you know!”

The end of the rock field and the necropolis beyond it is only a few more metres when Jet’s lungs go on strike. Or rather, his throat- it closes quite suddenly, in a sensation that is familiar in two ways. Firstly, because Cecil Kanagawa gave him a sampling of the pain in the prison- this is that pain, turned up by a few thousand degrees. The highest setting. Secondly, because Jet has lived with this allergy for nearly 40 years and recognises the symptoms. The other experience was only a few seconds long- too short for his body to respond properly. But this just keeps going. This keeps going and gives his body ample time to connect with what is being done to him and begin shutting down.

Whatever the Kanagawas put in him must have had traces of tree-nut, because he is definitely going into anaphylactic shock. Well. If it wasn’t going to be drugs that killed Jet it might as well be the first and greatest bane of his life.

He has got to stop. Spots dance in front of his eyes. Already out of breath from running, Jet   
“I can’t-” Jet takes another shallow breath. “I can’t get- enough.”

“You can’t breathe? Is that it? You can’t breathe?”

He manages to nod.

“Is it the pain? Is it something else? Ya’allah, Jet, your skin is burning!”

It feels like a fever. Jet assumed the toxic sun and thin shell of atmosphere were combining to sunburn him, but it’s too hot, now, getting under his skin and into his muscles. 

“Jet, you need to get up. Please, get up.”

Faintly, he is aware that Diamond has gained a good deal on them. That they will find them at any moment. He hasn’t got the space in his airways to say anything, so thumps Nureyev in the shoulder with his scraped elbow. 

“I already told you, I’m not leaving you behind.” 

Could he? Nureyev so pallid he is nearly jaundiced. How much longer can the painkillers and Nureyev’s own stubbornness propel him forwards? Not that much longer. He needs help. He needs Vespa.

Jet pushes him back again.

“Stop that! 

“He can’t breathe enough to talk back.”

Diamond. Emerging from the left, panting, the skin of their face hanging from a metallic 

“Would you believe I forgot I had this? Cecil gave it to me, just in case.” Diamond laughs, showing the device in their palm. “That’s the kind of day I’m having. A bad one. In case my skin hanging off my fucking bones didn’t tip you off.”

Jet knows what they intend to do. Being helpless to stop it feels appropriate rather than horrifying. This might as well happen to him. Jet may deserve this.

Nureyev stands. He begins to speak, to dissuade Diamond from what he has also guessed at, but this only makes Diamond act faster. They crush the device in their palm and toss the scraps into the sand with relish. 

That is fine, then.

Nureyev gets between them and Jet. Diamond picks Nureyev up as easily as a cat scooping up their kitten and throws him about a dozen metres away. Only luck prevents Nureyev from slamming into a rock as he goes; he hits the sand and rolls.

Breathless or no, that is enough to get Jet standing. If there’s an ounce of common sense in Nureyev’s head he will let Jet buy him time to get to the necropolis and find the others. 

Diamond sees Jet rise and grins. “Earth makes us sturdy, huh?”

Getting up is about all Jet can do. He lets Diamond come to him and does not resist when they seize him by the shoulder, digging their thumb into the laser-burn.

They slam Jet backwards into a rock-face. Jet can’t even cry out in pain. Over Diamond’s broad shoulder, he sees Nureyev struggling into a kneeling position. He quickly braces his hands on the earth and brings up an alarming quantity of blood and other substances Jet can’t identify. Stuff that should probably stay on the inside.

“Look at what you did to my face.” Diamond brings him up, close to them, the blood-washed metal that peers through the peeling skin. “Cecil is going to have a field day on me again. I’ve only got so much flesh left, you know. Every single damned time I so much as scrape my knee, he hustles me into his stupid laboratory and steals one of my organs. You’re fucking me up real bad here.”

Jet stares at them, saying nothing. Feels like his air comes through a straw. 

Diamond’s hand moves from his shoulder to his throat. “You’re not that impressive, you know. I expected more fighting back from you.”

They begin to squeeze. Jet resolves that he will not shut his eyes until his vision darkens completely- let Diamond watch him die. Let Diamond know that Jet is not impressed with them either. Keep their attention on him too.

“I should take you back to Hoosegow. You’re a valuable asset, you know. But…I don’t know, I think your corpse might do just as well. Cecil could recycle you into one of those CameramenTM, make a personal body guard out of you.”

What little space was left in his throat shuts beneath Diamond’s hand. Pure reflex causes Jet to grasp at the hand, try to peel it off, but there is no contest between their strength. 

“That would be in your favour, wouldn’t it?” says Nureyev.

God, this idiot. Jet is over here sacrificing himself for Nureyev’s sake and Nureyev is trying to bounce it back to him. They’re trapped in a ping-pong volley of self-sacrifice that’s going to kill both of them.

Disinterested, Diamond glances back at Nureyev. “You’re not dead yet?”

Nureyev kneels with a straight back. His hands prop him up behind his back. “Not yet. I want to ask you something. Did you know that Juno stopped drinking?”

The pressure on Jet’s throat relaxes- the extra pressure- and he is permitted to slump back, collapsing at Diamond’s feet.

“What the fuck did you just say?”

Nureyev continues smugly. “He stopped drinking. He communicates, he expresses his emotions, he reads. Hell, he even jogs now. Because he’s forced to, but he jogs. What do you think about that?”

In a flurry of movement, Diamond has got Nureyev off his knees and off his feet. They drive a fist into his middle. This time, though, Jet cannot rise to help, nor squeeze out so much as a gasp. He can’t do a thing but watch.

Nureyev seems to want it that way. Laughing, he rolls back up to his feet, effortlessly as a punching-clown. 

Diamond takes a step back. They might be afraid of Nureyev, now. It is hard to tell with most of their face hanging off. “How do you- you know him?”

“Do I know Juno? More than that! I’m afraid I’m Juno’s partner. And I know all about you, Diamond Té.”

Diamond grabs Nureyev by the throat, opening their mouth to roar or scream or curse. Instead, Nureyev brings something out of his waistband and plugs their mouth shut with it- the gun, from the juveniles’ guard.

The gunshot lights Diamond up from the inside. Their face glows for an instant before it is blown apart. A geyser of all manner of unpleasant material splashes Nureyev. 

Diamond’s body falls backwards. The impact propels blood high into the air, along with a plume of dust. The blood and the dust mix to make a thick sleet of muddy blood that settles over both of them.

Nureyev stoops and wipes the blood from his face with the hem of Diamond’s shirt. For good measure, he gives the corpse as good a kick as he can in his prison slippers. 

Secure in the knowledge that Nureyev still has the energy to move, Jet takes this as his cue to pass out.

(Juno)

Omar comes when he is called. Of course he does. 

Traditionally, the authority figures in Juno’s life have disappointed him or out-right abused him. The only person, off the top of his head, who has ever assumed any authority over Juno without also making his life a little bit miserable was a venerable old Rabbi he hasn’t seen since he was twenty-two and stopped observing the High Holy Days in temple. Wow, he misses temple right now.   
This is a strange time to be hit by homesickness for temple and the Torah and the special cadence of Hebrew when it is spoken in prayer, but it is where Juno is, and it is what Juno is thinking about as Omar Khan comes towards him with a nightstick hanging in his hand. In previous near-death experiences, he has thought about loved ones. His faith and his culture probably count.

Mick has still got a firm hold on Juno and intends to keep it, inserting himself between Juno and the advancing Omar like a shield. 

Behind him, Juno takes the bow from his back. He was really hoping he wouldn’t have to use it today- on a person, that is. Property damage is never out of the question.

Can he do this? If Omar raises a hand against him or Mick in between them, can Juno shoot him?

Juno nocks an arrow. 

But sometimes the universe is merciful. Sometimes, a divine hand intervenes and prevents Juno from having to explore the darker corners of himself.

One minute, Omar is there and the next minute he just isn’t. He just blinks out of reality- whipped out of it by a greyish-reddish blur that Juno’s brain needs a few extra seconds to register. Omar’s cry of shock and the furious bellow that replies identifies the blur as Buddy, who does not quite knock Omar off the stage as she probably intended to. Instead, they tussle along the edge of the platform at the eyeline of the CameramenTM.   
Buddy has got the advantage of surprise and has begun to crack Omar out of his armour like she’s peeling a lobster out of a boiled shell, with her bare hands and a Karelian temper. It doesn’t help that she is also emitting a sustained low of rage summoned from deep within her belly, that Buddy’s helmet has been knocked off of her and released a storm of red hair, and the system of bobby pins and barrettes she uses to conceal the melted side of her face has come loose.

Essentially, Omar has just been tackled by a malformed banshee.

His reaction is appropriate in that he is screaming and batting at Buddy’s claws with fruitless fists. There is no stopping Buddy right now. She is determined to have Omar out of his armour to bruise his flesh properly, and has managed such a fantastic entrance that the entire body of Hyperion City law-enforcement are shocked into immobility. They only watch as the last/only good cop in Hyperion City is rolled about the stage of a state execution by a demon wearing a Kanagawa uniform.

This scene, on the other hand, spurs Ruby into motion. After their dramatic entrance, Ruby has done little but stand about looking impressive, occasionally mantling over her passengers. Listening, Juno thinks, for the psychic voices of the settlers, or just waiting for the right moment to pitch in. Maybe she wouldn’t intervene to save Kanagawa Cassandra or stop Min from misbehaving, but if Buddy is going to cut loose then Ruby is going to follow her example. She is wearing a dragon and intends to realize the potential of this situation, 

While the rest of them are pinned to the spot trying to figure out how they should react to Buddy’s appearance, Ruby opens her wings. The dusty smell of reptilian skin suffuses the air as they unfold and cast a shadow over Mick and Juno. With a few pumps of her wings, Ruby whips up a brutal wind and takes to the air. 

Buddy and Omar continue to tussle. All eyes turn to the dragon rising above Hoosegow. Ruby works furiously to gain height until it looks like she has reached the edge of the atmospheric shell, and then pivots into a dive-bomb.

“Don’t just stand there!” Omar screeches, at last. “Help me!”

Although it’s definitely not what he wanted them to do, Omar’s cry for help snaps the cops and guards out of it. Hundreds of guns are trained on Ruby’s plummeting form and blast an enormous wave of laser-fire. The lasers do about as much harm to Ruby as raindrops. But what else are the cops going to do?

On the other hand, Sasha has got enough of her wits about her to respond to Omar. She breaks into a run, apparently aiming to boot Buddy off of Omar.

Juno grabs her around the middle. He’s not heavy enough to knock her down entirely, but he does slow her down. 

“For the love of God, Juno!” stumbling, Sasha grabs his hands and tries to pry him away from her.

Juno knits his fingers together at her waist. “She’s with me!”

“Why the fuck are you with Buddy Aurinko?”

“Why the fuck are you with Min Kanagawa?” who hasn’t yet moved from Cassandra’s body.

Sasha looks at Buddy, who has just ripped off Omar’s chest-piece and is going for the stuff around his neck now  
“She’s gonna kill him!”

“No I am not!” Buddy snaps. “I am simply going to strip him of his armour and hit him with the bits until he leaves!”

At this moment, Ruby lands her dive-bomb. Sort of. At the last second instead of coming out of it at the last second and breathing fire on the cops, as Juno would have, Ruby uses the last instant of her fall to change shape. The dragon changes to a monitor lizard that lands harmlessly and lightly among the crowd.

There is a flurry of confusion. Nobody knows what to aim their gun at. Many didn’t see where the dragon went.

And then Ruby transforms again. Back into the dragon so there is absolutely no missing her. But again, rather than spilling flame or tearing through the ranks with her teeth as Juno would be tempted to do, Ruby just gallops. Cops bounce off her left and right. Several are swept underneath her body and emerge untrampled but bruised on the other end. As one, the horde of CameramenTM retreat to a safer distance. They have no interest in joining this scrimmage of dragon scales and poorly aimed laser-fire without direct orders, and continue to record the chaos for the universe to watch.

“Fucking Martian.” mumbles Sasha. Oh, of course she knows what they can do! Of course! Juno is going to punch her right in her collaborating mouth. 

“Sasha, do I need to tell you this is all out of hand, or can you infer that for yourself?”

“I’ll infer you, Juno!” but her heart isn’t in it. She is also looking at her wife when she says it.

And then to Min.

“Ma’am?” 

“I said arrest him. Arrest Juno for my daughter’s murder.”

“Jesus Christ!” Mick looks at the guards in appeal. “Are you guys gonna go along with that- oh, ok, I’m seeing a lot of nods and a fingers on triggers. Are you trying to pull a coup on me?”

Min doesn’t raise her head. “You can’t be unseated from power that you never had.”

Two weeks ago, Mick would not have done what he does now. Two weeks ago, Mick would never have thought of disturbing the grief of a mother who has just lost a child- whether or not she was responsible for that child while aiming for him.  
But a lot has happened in the last two weeks. It is with a strange sense of loss that Juno watches as his friend picks up the discarded chest piece of Omar’s armour, walks over to Min and smokes her across the jaw with it. 

Later, this will make Juno sad. For now, this just spurs Juno into action. He leaps off of Sasha and charges in to help Mick- not to beat Min up, but to keep the guards off of him. Yeah, they’re definitely going to kill Mick and Mick is so focussed on Min that he doesn’t care or notice.  
Min has risen to fight back. A butterfly knife flashes in her hand and aims for Mick’s gut. He blocks it with his shield and, while Min attempts to wrench her knife free, headbutts her over the rim of it. She falls backwards and into the knot of guards.

Arum gets to Mick’s side before Juno. As a gun comes up and points at Mick’s chest. Arum’s secondary arms whip out and snatch it away, tossing the gun into the general mayhem that Ruby is causing beneath the platform. His arms whip through the air and have disarmed all of them within seconds. Now, they’ve only got night-sticks to fight back with.

“One more chance!” Mick snarls. Blood drips from his forehead, split open by the blow against Min’s. “You leave right now. You leave Hyperion City and you never come back.”

Min is hauled to her feet and steadied by her guards. “Or what?”

“Or I’ll make you.”

Behind him, Ruby roars. She has snagged a cop by their helmet and is swinging them around like a terrier with a sock. When she lets go, the cop describes a wide arc through the air, ass over tea kettle, and lands out of sight at the edge of the brawl. The crowd around Ruby is thinning. They are running away, in drips and drabs. The majority of them are still knotted around her shooting their useless guns, but Ruby has definitely put a dent in the numbers. 

“You have no right to do this.”

“I was elected to do this!” 

Mick charges in. Night-sticks crash against his armour-shield. One catches the crook of his right arm, but he doesn’t stop. Bows aren’t the best for close combat, but Juno’s got what he’s got, and starts shooting. The first arrow lodges in the thigh of the guard who managed to hit Mick. Juno can tell from the scream that the arrow strikes with enough force to pierce the armour.   
This is a theme, he’s finding- armour that is designed to protect against lasers isn’t much good against analogue weapons. 

Juno sees Buddy roll off of Omar and engage a guard to her right- this time, with the broadsword drawn from her enchanted fanny-pack. She rushes to Juno’s side and begins to swing it. This is the final straw for Min. She balks and runs for the prison doors. Mick can’t get past her guards to chase after her and has to stop trying, just to stay on his feet. Even with Arum’s many arms whirling about and Juno there, popping arrows into every non-fatal spot he can hit at short-range, Mick has got to keep his wits about him.  
It’s been a long time since he had to fight, and Old-Town teenagers usually didn’t fight to the death. 

Omar, for his part, just sits there until Alessandra pulls him to his feet. Juno can’t hear what they are saying and doesn’t pause to try- he is too busy clubbing a guard in the visor with his bow. 

“Fuck!” and then Sasha is with him.

Beside him. She catches a nightstick swinging for Mick with her armoured fore-arm and snatches it away with her free hand, then turns it on the guard. As they turn to flee and Sasha to pursue them, she holds Juno’s eye and continues to swear.

“Fuck you, Juno! Fuck you, Mick!”

Juno grins at her. “I love you!”

“I love you too, jackass!”

Alessandra is happy to watch them. She may also be holding Omar back. Omar doesn’t look sure of what day of the week it is, much less sure of whom he should help. Every time Juno gets a chance between swings and shots and dodges to look at him, Omar looks worse and sweatier. 

“Kick their asses, honey!” calls Alessandra.

Sasha peels a guard off Mick’s back and throws them into another, knocking them sprawling. Noticing that Buddy is having a hard time getting a purchase on the blood-slippery stage, Sasha gets behind her, grabs her shoulders and starts to push Buddy forwards. Buddy doesn’t question where this sudden momentum has come from, but starts swinging her sword so fast that it becomes a blur in the air. 

Distantly, Juno hears Omar calling to him. He turns and catches a glimpse of Omar’s retreating back through the whirling of bodies and weapons. 

“You win, Steel!” Omar is back to his usual roar. “This is my bad! I quit!”

The one argument Omar has allowed him to win in their twenty years of knowing each other and Juno is too preoccupied with putting arrows in fascist hamstrings to rub it in his face. Typical goddamned Omar Khan.

Juno ends up with his back against Mick’s. For a good minute or two, they remain pressed together, moving in sideways, crabbish steps in sync so as not to be separated. The ground is getting difficult. There are a lot of guards on the ground with smashed-in visors or curled around one of the arrow wounds that riddles their legs- only one of them has escaped Juno’s wrath so far and Juno puts that down to luck on their part. 

There is also the mutual unspoken agreement to give Cassandra’s body space which means that they are all bunched up in the same half of the stage. They’re having to share this space with the props for the execution, which means a lot of weaving and barked shins. 

But they are winning.

And when Arum drops the last of the guard with a swift blow to their exposed jaw, he points something out that makes it clear to Juno that they have probably won the day.   
“Who are those people?” 

Juno follows Arum’s gesture to the far edge of the crowd about Ruby. 

Min has gotten away. Cassandra is dead. Cecil’s place in this mess doesn’t bear thinking about, but Juno choses to believe that he is both innocent of wrong-doing (this time) and out of the way. Jet has been freed and will have freed Nureyev by now.  
And this? It never even occurred to Juno that he should wish for this.

“Looks like about half of Hyperion City.” says Juno, lowering his bow.

Arum narrows his eyes in approval. “And they’ve brought cricket bats.”

He is right. A lot of cricket bats, and baseball bats, pipes that were clearly picked up from the side of the street, wrenches, spanners, wheel-jacks, large sticks and some absolute genius has a leaf-blower. Clad in helmets, padded sports uniforms, protective aprons for industrial work and sweatpants, Hyperion City oozes from every alley, every avenue, every manhole.   
They come in a slow, steady wave that crashes into the cops from the back. Those that were not already turned away from Ruby to flee struggle to form up against this new threat. The cops and supplementing detectives are, of course, so armoured that the actual damage to the cops amounts to the damage that a bean experiences when its tin is bounced around a bit. 

“Why does that guy have a hockey stick?”

“We have an indoor ice-rink now.” says Alessandra. 

“No shit!”

“Yeah, since last year! Sash and I go ice-skating sometimes.”

Hyperion City! Gotta love her. 

Hopping off the stage, Juno nocks another arrow and tosses himself into the fray. 

(Vespa)

Seconds before her shoulder would smash into the CameramanTM’s stomach, Vespa falls to her side and slides between the thing’s legs. She gets a glimpse of a surprised lens aiming down at her and then she is crashing into Cecil. Kind of punting his legs out from under him as she rockets past. It would be great if he fell back into the pit, but alas, he just falls on his butt and scoots a metre or so backwards. Vespa lurches to her feet and starts running. Damien, with his long legs, is not far behind and quickly over-takes her. He has the courtesy to grab Vespa’s hand so that he will not get too far ahead of her.

In her ear, she has got Rita screeching the directions. There is another voice, too, one that she can recognise as generated by her own head because it is Nureyev’s, and there is no way that he is here. He wants her to come back. He says that she needs to look more closely at Cecil’s death-props. He is inside one of them and losing blood fast and- no, no, be ground yourself, girl. Find something to ground.  
In the end it is Guapo that grounds her. His plants a grateful kiss on her chin with the barbed end of his tongue. That should hurt, but it tickles. 

“Fuck Cecil.” Vespa says between gasps. “You’re my baby now and forever. If Buddy doesn’t like it, she can sleep on the couch.”

For secret passageways that supposedly comb the outskirts of Hyperion and link several sinister facilities together, these halls are pretty boring. Well-lit and beige and marked with arrows to prevent people from getting turned around. After the first few halls, Rita no longer has to give directions because there is a path clearly marked for them. A series of chrome signs point them towards a ‘hangar’, which has been amended to ‘hangar/settler storage’ in sharpie. 

Of course, Cecil and his bodyguard are not far behind them. Vespa only hopes that Cecil’s fashionably tight jeans will slow him down a little bit. 

She can tell they are close when it gets humid. They run through a wall of heat that is as humid as Thai was, if not worse, and a sickly kind of damp that sticks to the skin. Vespa can tell this heat is organic. It reminds her of the furnace fever-heat that came off the Martian’s wounds when she was cleaning them out, just turned up to 1000.

“Rita, I think we found them.”

“Great! Tell me the minute ya do an’ I’ll send Ruby your way.”

A moment later, they do. Behind a thick plexiglass door that is fogged up with condensation that suggests a greenhouse rather than an interment camp. Damien shoulders the heavy door open and ushers Vespa inside first. The humidity goes from uncomfortable to oppressive- the heat of too many damp bodies in too tight a space. The hangar has been transformed from a big empty-ish space with high ceilings to a cluttered, medical nightmare. The ceilings are strung with a rigging of tarps, serving as both privacy partitions and the boundaries of pens, and then there are chains, just straight up chains, running into every one of the cells that Vespa can see. From this vantage point of this staircase, she can only just see the glistening of a few of the closest settlers’ bodies: a stray tendril passing underneath their tarp into the aisles, or the ridge of a body that has had to be contorted to fit into their tiny space visible over the top of their tarps.   
And on each bit of body she can see, there are wounds. Wounds as deep and dirtied as those she tended for the Martian about her waist.

As Damien slips in after her, Cecil’s bodyguard is right behind him. Damien throws his weight against the door. Seconds later, the CameramanTM crashes into it, nearly throwing Damien down the stairs.

“Go on!” he nods down the stairs. “Clear it! I’ll hold them off for the moment!”

Vespa doesn’t understand what he means by ‘clear it’ at first, but then she hears a cry of surprise. She was so distracted by the settlers’ horrible conditions that she didn’t realise there are a handful of white-coated technicians dotting the aisle.   
By now, they have all stopped to stare at the intruders- Vespa, with her arms full of barbed blubber and Damien, a seven-and-a-half-foot tall man apparently barricading the emergency exit. 

“Who the hell are you?” demands a hijabi, coming to the foot of the stairs. Her coat is stained in sweat and green body fluids.

“Who am I?” Vespa puts Guapo down and marches down to the woman, squaring up to her until the tips of their noses are a hair’s breadth away. “Who the fuck do you think?”

There is a hammering at the door. Over Damien’s shoulder and through the condensation, Cecil’s face can be seen, pressed against the glass.  
“They’re intruders! Don’t let them at the settlers!”

Damien slams a fist into the glass, over Cecil’s face. “You be quiet!”

“No, you-”

“Here’s what I’m gonna do,” Vespa says, giving the woman a solid push in the shoulder and projecting so that her colleagues can hear as well “As soon as I finish talking, which is gonna be, say, in two minutes, I’m gonna take a big ass knife out of my boot and use it on anybody who is still in this facility. Frankly, I’d kill all of you if I weren’t on a time crunch. You’re all responsible for crimes against humanity that, in a just world, would have your asses on trial for war crimes. But it’s not a just world. It’s a shitty world that the Kanagawas run, so the only thing that’s going to hold you accountable is me.”

“Who the fuck are you?” yells a guy wearing only boxers under his lab coat.

“Tell ‘em yer an inspector!” says Rita. Her mind is obviously on the scene of a crime-stream she watched recently. 

“Vespa Ilkay.”

“I thought you were dead.” says the hijabi.

“Consider me a ghost, then. A ghost with a big-ass knife.”

Just to drive the point home, Vespa draws the dagger from her boot, and then a second, slightly smaller one from a pocket on her calf. 

“Ok!” the hijabi puts her hands up and backs away. “Ok, you win! I hate this job anyway! It’s too hot in here and-”

“And you’re carving people up for warlords, yeah, it’s not a good look.”

“Jeez, Ms Vespa, you’re just mean today. I like it!”

“I’m going! I’m going! Ya’allah, I’m going, I swear, you can have the settlers!”

The rest of the technicians are quick to follow her example. A parade of sweaty, half-nude people jog past Vespa with their hands up.   
No sooner than they have abandoned their posts does Cecil make his entrance. Realising that he has lost the battle, Damien leaps from the door and clears the stairs in the same bound, and at the same time the CameramanTM’s broad torso bursts through the top-half of the door. 

They knock it door all the way out of the frame. It shatters where Damien landed, the shards missing him by a narrow margin as he tucks and rolls. Cecil bursts out onto the landing.

“Seriously, what are you people trying to do?” 

By way of answer, Vespa throws her smaller knife at him. He dodges and responds with an actual throwing star. A throwing star! Vespa has never seen that used in real combat before, nor the knife-edged disc that he throws after it. Where is he keeping these things?

“Are you trying to steal the Martians? They’re not worth it, I promise! You can’t make cure-mother out of ‘em.” 

“Did you tell Ruby?” asks Damien as he dusts glass splinters from his shoulders. 

“I’m tryin’ to get to her,” says Rita. “You guys should see the mess she’s makin’ outta the cops! I’m gonna make you watch it later, by the way, I absolutely am! I- oh, dunk, I gotta go dark for a second. I’m gonna see if turning you two off’ll get me the signal strength to get to Ruby- I promise you that makes sense. Sorry! You guys just keep doing what’cher doing!”

“That’s fine, Rita.”

An entire Molotov cocktail lands at their feet, unlit, and splashes their boots with an expensive liqueur. 

Cecil stomps down the stairs. “Who are you talking to?” 

“None of your business.”

“It is my business! This is my family’s hangar. You said your name was Vespa Ilkay? Aren’t you dead? I thought you fell off a building.”  
“I got better.”

She is done playing. Drawing a third knife from her other boot, Vespa aims for Cecil’s head. Cecil dodges by falling into a full split. Ok, this kid’s style of fighting has passed from weird ot avante-garde. 

“Juno! Sic!” and he points at Vespa. 

He picks up a shard of glass and comes at Damien with a sudden, urgent bloodthirst. He’s done playing too.

Cecil crashes into Damien in the same instant that the CameramanTM bowls Vespa over. She has no chance to brace herself and falls back a good two, three metres, her right arm pierced by the broken glass as she lands. The CameramanTM lets themselves fall after her- on top of her, seizing her by the throat. With a scream of frustration, Vespa slams her boots into their pectorals and pushes up.  
A surge of adrenal strength helps her do it and so they are just stuck there. Vespa with her knees pressed to her own chest and the torso of this CameramanTM hanging over her, playing airplane.

While Damien and Cecil are a writhe of knives and teeth on the other end of the aisle, Vespa and the CameramanTM contemplate each other. They aren’t reaching for her at all. Whether that’s because landing smack on Vespa’s size-7’s has knocked the wind out of them or because they are going to try to chew her head off with that crocodile mouth…but Vespa can’t bring herself to strike first.

For the first time, Vespa really looks at the CameramanTM. She remembers what Buddy told her about that dump of them in Space Hell and makes herself consider the implications of that corpse-pile.   
How long do they get to live? How do they find out when one of them dies? Do they mourn? Are they allowed a chance to mourn?

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Guapo’s damp bulk shuffling over just as far as his stub-legs can carry him. Coming to her aid. 

Vespa thinks about what it is like to exist only as a tool for the agenda of someone who considers you interchangeable. She thinks about contracts and the years taken from her, taken from Buddy, and her throat constricts.

Blood oozes from her arm. Guapo’s breathing labours with the effort of what is for him, running, but to spectators, a frantic mosey. Her legs have begun to tremble. Still, the CameramanTM does not move. 

Vespa nods in Cecil’s direction and says something which she would have wanted to hear when she was in the CameramanTM’s position. 

“Hey. Fuck this guy.”

The CameramanTM’s lens grows wide. Vespa’s knees are digging into her ribcage. One of them is going to pop under her own kneecap any second now. But she makes herself stay reasonable.

“Fuck Cecil. Fuck the Kanagawas. Fuck what they do to you. Fuck what they made you for.”

The lens clicks in a blink. Mercifully, the CameramanTM gets off of her and kneels in front of her. Their posture is tense but non-threatening. 

When they are not acting as a bodyguard or henchperson, they kind of just look…normal? Like a dude. This CameramanTM that Vespa has caught off-guard with her proclamation of solidarity just looks like a regular dude. One composed of several different apex predators, sure, but they also wouldn’t look out of place sitting with a coffee in a café, or browsing at a bookstore, or slouched on a sofa in front of a TV.

The revelation puts tears in Vespa’s eyes. This entire time, CameramenTM were so much more familiar than she realised; embroiled in shitty jobs that they are dependent upon for survival, just like she was when she was in medical debt. 

Flushed green from exertion, Guapo reaches her at last and slithers into Vespa’s lap. He assumes a defensive pose that involves a lot of hairs standing straight up and a growl that sounds like a sink backing up. 

She sits up. “It’s ok, boy. It’s ok.”

Vespa reaches out with her palm up. Hesitantly, the CameramanTM raises their own, gargantuan, clawed hand, and places it trembling over Vespa’s. She squeezes the hand and runs her thumb over the scarred knuckles. 

“Look,” Vespa turns their hands over so hers is on top. “Mine are like that too.”

Even though he is in the midst of climbing on Damien’s back to stab him in the neck, Cecil starts to interfere. He must be wondering why he can’t hear Vespa being bounced around the catwalk.

“Juno! Get on with it! I’m sick of this!”

“Please, let me help my friend. Let me help you.” says Vespa softly. 

“Juno, will you just pick a limb and rip it off? What is wrong with you?” a yelp from Damien as he shakes Cecil off at the last second, ducking a swipe for the back of his neck.

The CameramanTM hugs Vespa. Guapo squishes between them. Normally, Vespa is not one to appreciate an unsolicited hug… but this feels right. 

“JUNO! STOP HUGGING THE ENEMY!”

“We are not enemies. We are class allies.”

“What?” scoffs Cecil. 

“You heard me!” 

Standing, Vespa tips Guapo out of her lap and urges the CameramanTM to stand.

“What the fuck do you- what are you doing? Are you out of your mind? I’m talking to both of you.” Cecil misses Damien’s clavicle by such a narrow margin that his shirt is gashed. “Juno has about as much sentience as a petri dish. And you, Juno, you’re toeing the line, mister.”

Cecil has managed to get his butterfly knife in Damien’s back. Damien’s yell is more of anger than pain. Their size difference is such that Damien is basically trying to swat a gnat that has got big pieces of glass. But Cecil has left an opening, now, distracted by his CameramanTM’s misbehaviour, and Damien takes advantage of this with an almighty punch to the back of Cecil’s head.

Cecil goes down hard. 

What happens next is a bit hard to follow. Vespa is aware of a flicker of movement between her feet, aware enough to stumble over to the side. She catches herself on the CameramanTM’s arm. The two of them back up, heedless of the glass all around them. 

It is Guapo’s tongue that has moved. And it has caught around Cecil’s throat. Gagging, Cecil claws at the rubbery tongue, but he has left his bit of glass lodged in Damien’s back. He is dragged across the floor with an amazing speed. His fingernails claw for a purchase in the ground, but it is slick with humidity and dried Martian blood.   
There is nothing Cecil can do but struggle and curse as he is dragged to Guapo’s mouth. First his voice is muffled. Then, abruptly, severed as Guapo wreaks his revenge. 

Guapo’s jaw snaps down once, severing the vessels and flesh, twice, snapping through the muscle and deep tissues, and finally, on the third blow, snapping the spine so that head comes away in his mouth.

He swallows it whole. 

Cecil’s body gives a few twitches. One of the hands goes up to his neck as if to check whether or not the head is really gone. It drops onto his chest less than halfway there. The body slackens. 

Damien turns and wretches in a corner. Logically and aesthetically, that was disturbing. But emotionally? The most satisfying experience Vespa has had in a long time.

Vespa clicks her tongue and pats the ground in front of her. Licking his gory chops, Guapo shuffles over and receives his head-scritches gratefully.  
“That’s my boy. Eat the rich. Are you…sir…are you ok?”

The CameramanTM turns their lens to her, pauses, and then flashes the phrase ‘FUCK HIM’ in giant red letters.”

She laughs and claps them on the arm. “Couldn’t agree more! You ok, Damien?”

He grunts an affirmative.

“Come here. I’ll get that knife out of your back for you.”

Just as Vespa has got a grasp on the hilt, a section of the roof the size of a bus is ripped away. Sunlight floods in. There are gurgling cries of surprise and joy as the settlers feel the sun for the first time in two weeks, punctuated by a shriek of static and a higher-pitched shriek that announces Rita’s triumphant return.

“I’m back! What’d I miss?”

These wet exclamations of joy swell as a grass-coloured dragon crawls through the hole, upside-down like a bat and scurries to the ceiling above Vespa and Damien. Suddenly, a modestly-sized monitor lizard is falling towards them. On pure instinct, Damien catches it and is knocked off his feet for the umpteenth time as Ruby goes from lizard to large woman in his arms.

Ruby flies into Vespa’s arms with a sob. “You found them! You found- oh, god, uh, whose body is that?”

Vespa thumps her on the back. “Cecil. He earned it, believe me. Hey, guy, don’t worry, she’s a friend.”

The CameramanTM continues to shy away from Ruby all the same. Vespa doesn’t blame them. That was a confusing entrance to be sure.

“I believe you! Listen, we’ve got to get to the necropolis. You guys get on my back. The others will be there soon, then we’ll scoop up these folks and get the hell out of here.”

Damien shakes his head. “The ship we came in isn’t big enough for more than three or four of these folks. How do you figure we’re getting them out?”

“The necropolis, Damien. It’s not a necropolis at all. You guys just don’t know what our space-ships look like.”

(Nureyev)

Well, if Nureyev wasn’t sure that his insides were irretrievably messed up before, then he is now. He still can’t really feel the pain. A fog of painkillers obscures it from him, but he can feel that the impact of Diamond’s fist has done something catastrophic.   
Creeping over to Jet’s side, Nureyev sits beside his friend and arranges him in a more comfortable position- as comfortable as someone suffocating can be, that is. 

He then lifts his own shirt to inspect the damage.

Two bruises, each roughly the shape and size of a fist, expanding. They have expanded so much that they already meet in the middle. Nureyev sighs. This action alone is enough to make his chest spasm, which suggests that his lungs may have also suffered. Great! Well, it wasn’t like he was going to be able to get a round into Diamond at any distance. Better that they got right up in his face and got in one good hit than cat-and-moused him for a while, making Nureyev waste his time on pot-shots that he couldn’t see far enough to be sure of.

They have killed each other. Maybe Diamond fell first, but they destroyed what was left of Nureyev’s insides. No doubt every piece of cystic flesh that hadn’t already burst is doing so gleefully, now, with Diamond’s help. Soon, it will begin to hurt again. Hurt in a way that Nureyev imagines he will be begging to be put out of his misery. 

An idea comes to Nureyev; would it not be better to lay down beside Jet and let nature do its work on the two of them? There is no way to stop the device that is killing Jet. There is nothing that can be done to salvage Nureyev’s body. Even if they were discovered by the others and whisked away to a top-of-the-line medical facility, Vespa would have to replace every bit of tissue inside of Nureyev, and the shock of the simplest of transplant procedures would probably finish him off.

If Nureyev survives today, then he will die tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then the day after, or the week after, or the month after. But he is tired of going along like that. He is tired of the pain and exhaustion and waiting for the next thing to go wrong with his body.  
Wouldn’t it be better to go out now? Just, lay beside a man he loves as a brother and let go?

So Nureyev does. He lays on his back beside Jet and clasps his hand. Jet squeezes. Maybe he is telling Nureyev to keep going. Maybe not.   
Maybe he is just grateful, as Nureyev is, that he is not alone at the end. 

“Go if you have to, brother.”

(Juno)

You’d think that the dragon leaving the humans to hash it out between each other would tip the balance towards the cops’ favour, you really would. 

Though this isn’t the first time Ruby has spoken into Juno’s head, it makes him scream when she makes them aware that she has got to live.

_I gotta go! Rita found them!_

She leapt into the sky, blasting cops in every direction with the pump of her wings. Her departure was hardly noticed- the cops were and are deeply embroiled in the fresh chaos that the Hyperioners have brought.  
Not that they are alone. Help comes from another direction. They do not necessarily need the help, but it comes anyway. A lot of the Kanagawas’ chickens are coming home to roost today.

The CameramemTM are still off to the side when it happens. A ripple passes among their hunched, huge ranks. All at once, the hum of their lens cuts out. They grow still and restless. They murmur amongst each other, disturbed by a shared experience that is invisible to the humans around them. 

After a moment of this disturbance, a CameramanTM edges their way out of the group and decides to act upon the message they that must have come in over the same pathways used to capture and transmit footage for the Kanagawas’.   
Which is to say, they grab a fleeing cop and lifts her over their head. Indignant, the cop screams and pummels at their thick arms. The CameramanTM pays no mind. Still brandishing the cop over-head, the CameramanTM steps up onto the bowed back of an obliging sibling and shows Hyperion what has changed.

Their lens glows about the edges of the screen. On it is a scene so horrifying that the entire riot kind of just stops for a few seconds, bats freezing in mid-swing. Juno himself has got a cop in a headlock stops bouncing their helmet off of knee to look.  
From the perspective of something extremely tall, Kanagawa Cecil can be seen getting punched in the head by an unknown assailant (Damien, if Juno had to guess), face-planting, having a green rope-like thing lassoed about his neck and dragged backwards into the mouth of a cross between a snapping turtle, porcupine and a gelatinous lichen. Cecil’s head pops off in the thing’s mouth. 

The next thing Juno knows, he is on the ground and well clear of the fight. Buddy has got his head in her lap. Arum blots out the sun as he leans over her.

“What happened?”

“Cecil was decapitated. You passed out. Darling, not to stop the fun, but I think that is as good a cue as any to get going.”

“But- Mick, Mick and Sasha.”

“They’re fine.” Arum points out Mick in the crowd. “Look at him go. I feel as though we’d be robbing him of some much-needed catharsis if we stepped in to help.”

“Amazing that he’s still got the same bit of shield that he started with.” Buddy sits Juno up. “Look, this day is won. The Cameramen have joined the fight and if the fact that their faces are all stamped with the word ‘REVOLUTION’ is anything to go off of, I’d hazard to say that they’re on Mick’s side. We must take care of our own, Juno.”

True, the ranks of rioters have been swelled to the point of being gorged. There must be three or four Cameramen and Hyperioners fighting for every cop.

He bites his bottom lip, hating that she is right. “No word from Jet?”

“Not again, no.”

“Then I think you’re right. We’d better get to the necropolis.”

(Nureyev)

In his mind, dying was always painful. This is not painful so much as it is uncomfortable because of the heat and the sand, sticking to his skin and the blood that coats it. That Jet is here is a surprise. Just as he imagined his eventual death to be painful, he always imagined that he would be alone. Born alone, die alone and all that.   
Dying in an alien desert next to an Earthling dying of anaphylaxis is not anything Nureyev would have predicted for himself. But it is happening.

Slowly. Nureyev wants to conk out. He’s on the verge of passing out and pushes back against it constantly, because as much as he wants to it would mean marooning Jet on the wrong side of the Styx. Once Jet stops breathing, he will go. Then, he will close his eyes.

Nureyev is congratulating himself on his magnanimity when a strange object glides through the air above him. Not too far, though, if Nureyev is able to see it. He squints. All he can make out is that the object is green. He can certainly hear it- meaning that he can hear the scream trailing off of it.   
A scream from a distinctly sand-papery voice. Distinctly Vespa’s scream. 

Nureyev watches the thing swoop lower and disappear in the direction of the necropolis. Vespa’s voice goes with it.  
Slowly, Nureyev gets onto his knees. He glances underneath his shirt again and notes with interest that the bruise has spread along his stomach up to his chest. His pectorals are stained along the bottom with it. The stain has flowed into the old keyhole-scars as if they are gutters. 

“Jet, get up. I revoke your permission to die. We’ve got to move.”

One eye cracks open and peers at Nureyev.

“Don’t you make that face at me. I just saw a dragon land at the necropolis. If that doesn’t feel like a sign to get up and move, then I invite you to explain it.”

Because Jet can’t talk back right now, there is nothing to do but listen. Slowly and painfully, Jet gets onto his side. From there, into a kneeling position, and then into a pistol-squat, and then onto his feet. Nureyev secures his grip on Jet’s waist, marvelling that he can get all the way around in the first place. Thank Allah for his ridiculous, lanky wingspan.

The first step is obviously a torture. The second as well, the third- all of them are torturous to Jet, and Nureyev feels like a world-class asshole for making him try. 

“You’re going to stay awake, you dense-boned bastard, and it’s going to be because you are so enraptured with the tale of woe that I’m about to weave for you that you’ll be afraid to blink, lest you miss an instant of it.”

Jet makes a noise. This may an expression of doubt, or it may be a plea that Nureyev lower him back into the sand and let him die there. Either way, Nureyev choses to ignore it and helps him take a first step. 

“My name is Nergüi. Funny thing is, that means ‘no name’. In my culture it’s a way of warding off disease and bad luck, the idea being that the spirits and universe will skip straight over us in favour of somebody who does exist. It didn’t work. For me, at least. Half of the people of Mongol heritage on Brahma are named the same thing and I think most of them are already dead. Are you listening?”

(Juno)

//THEY ARRIVE AND ARE SECOND TO VESPA AND SUCH//

The necropolis at the edge of Hyperion City is one of only two to be discovered on Mars. Extra-dome exploration is prohibitively difficult and expensive. Those that have attempted it usually die in the process, or afterwards, bereft and irradiated. This, like its twin on the other hemisphere, has been left mostly to its own devices out of a combination of the typical superstitions that are ascribed to places of death and because of the expense. The danger, too.  
There is precious little to be taken from a Martian necropolis- scraps of grave gold, a few death masks here and there, a half-destroyed cameo on a crumbling wall. The structures are confounding too. A lot of halls and passages designed for creatures that were much larger than a human and in no way bipedal. 

Given what Juno has heard about this necropolis, it doesn’t surprise him to hear that he has actually grown up next to an alien spaceship. Seems on-brand for Hyperion City and Mars in general. 

Their real problem is that Jet and Nureyev are nowhere to be seen. When Buddy identified the necropolis as their meeting place, she correctly assumed that it would be easy to spot one another. There is one human structure built near the thing and it’s a Kanagawa-branded tent where a few cameras (not sentient) slumber through the break in filming. Vespa and Damien were easy to spot. In turn, they could see Buddy, Juno and Arum coming from a mile off.

“Where are the boys?” were the first words out of Buddy’s mouth.

“They aren’t with you?” 

Rita, now in everybody’s earpieces again, started to cry. Her nerves finally got the better of her. She has been crying ever since because there is nothing she can do, save for listen. The low-orbit satellites will take too long to hack into, so scanning for them or shuffling through aerial spy-footage is out of the question.

First, they checked along the rim of the necropolis. No matter the route Jet and Nureyev took to get here, they would have ended up in this general area. Juno keeps telling himself that one or both of them are just out of sight, fallen into a crevice or perhaps sheltering from the heat in a passageway near to the surface that has also muffled their rescuers’ voices. 

He doesn’t let himself think about the other possibility. The most likely one.

After combing the area directly behind the tent and finding nothing but his own footprints, Juno jogs back to the tent. In spite of what he hoped, the other two haven’t turned up in the ten minutes he has been looking. 

Hearing his boots on the sand, Buddy comes out of the tent. She clutches Guapo to her bosom as if he were her most precious possession in all the world. “No luck?”

“No.”

She bites her lower lip. A hole has been worn there already.  
Ruby disappeared into the stony guts of the necropolis as soon as Vespa and Damien were off of her back. She has got her tentacles plenty full with coaxing the ship back to life, so it has fallen to the rest of them to find their missing family members. 

A few minutes later, Vespa returns, then Arum, then Damien. No luck.

“I can’t imagine they’ve fallen into a passage,” says Arum, examining the bit of glass sticking out of his husband’s back. “We would hear them. Ruby would hear them at the very least, since she’s crawling about in there.”

“I know for sure they found each other,” Buddy insists. “Jet texted me. That was the only thing he texted. If that had been someone trying to lay a trap for me, they would have had to offer another location. I just told him where to go, I never put it into text.”

Juno begins to sweat harder. “Let’s be smart about this, Bud. Which way did they go?”

“I’ve no idea. I didn’t see him again after we parted to search for Nureyev.”

“Ok, and where were you?”

“I- I don’t know. The first level, nearer to you, I suppose. I was listening for a sign that they’d ended up outside again.”

“So we know they didn’t come out the front way. Or the side, because then you’d need to take the same roads to get here that we did and we know they didn’t. So where does that leave us?”

“The back?” suggests Rita.

“From where we’re standing…that undeveloped land behind the prison. There, that way.”

Once again, Buddy stays back at the tent, just in case the boys pop out of the necropolis-ship while the others are looking for them in the field. 

Nureyev and Jet have picked the worst possible terrain to get lost if they are actually lost back there. Towers and arches of red rock cast deep shadows that look like caves and caves that look like shadows, everything twisted and crowded in on itself so that it is almost impossible to keep sight of each other as they split up and search. If Jet and Nureyev got separated, that makes their job that much harder.  
But they are not going to leave without them. Juno is not going to leave without either of them, even if that just amounts to retrieving two bodies.

At least their voices carry well. The acoustics are amazing here. Their voices range into an echo that fills up every nook, every cranny of the place. 

“Jet!”

“Nureyev!”

“Jetffrey Sikuliaq!”

“Nureyev!”

“Jet- oh, Jesus-” Vespa is fifty or forty metres to Juno’s north. “I found a huge puddle of blood, guys! Look for a blood trail!”

“How?” replies Arum. “The blood and the sand are the same damned colour!”

A puddle of blood. It must indeed be a lot if Vespa can make it out from the blood. Shutting his eye, Juno leans against a spire of rock. Nausea knots in his stomach. The ground tries to spin out from underneath his feet.

“Please,” he says under his breath. “Just answer back.”

“I have been!”

Juno opens his eye.   
There they are, appearing around a chimney of red rock like a pair of demons out on a daytrip from hell. The elbow-bone of one of Jet’s arms is exposed to the open air and his skin has turned the colour of a third-degree sunburn. He draws in short, sharp breaths that are clearly not getting him enough oxygen. That he is standing and moving at all is a minor miracle, no doubt in part orchestrated by Nureyev needling him along. As for Nureyev, bruises and cuts pepper his skin. Blood drips over his lips with every word.

“I’ve been calling back for several minutes now! You fools couldn’t hear me over your own bellowing. Help me with him.”

“Baruch Hashem!”

Juno runs to them and ducks under Jet’s other arm, resisting the instinct to just kiss Nureyev instead.   
“Jet, you’re burning up!”

Jet answers by laying his cheek on the top of Juno’s head. He doesn’t look swollen on the outside, but by the sound of his breathing, his throat has got to be closed.

Inside the ear-piece, Rita goes from quietly crying to loud and inconsolable. She urges Juno to put the ear-piece on Jet so she can tell him how glad she is that he’s still alive, how much she likes his sister and how much his niece looks like him, except blonde and-

“What’s wrong with him?”

Nureyev gives Juno a grim smile. “Anaphylaxis. I believe the Kanagawas introduced some kind of…tree-nut releasing device into Jet’s system to control him.”

Under other circumstances, that would have Juno rolling on the floor. “Is he dying?”

“We both are, dear, but promise me you won’t make a fuss at the moment. At least wait to weep until we’ve had the chance to lie down.”

The others come quickly, summoned by Rita. Damien takes one look at Jet and decides that he will carry the other Earthling the rest of the way. In comparison to Damien, Jet is kind of petite- certainly petite enough that Damien is able to cradle and carry him without much effort. Nureyev declares that he can walk for himself. Juno puts an arm about his waist for support, anyway, and tries to explain the situation as they leave the rock field as a group. Vespa puts her arm about Nureyev’s shoulder and interjects when she thinks Juno has missed something important.

They do not do a good job of it. Nureyev tells them as much. “Frankly, I don’t care how or why you got here, nor do I care how we’re leaving. What I really must know is who that four-armed man is. Have you noticed that he-”

“Looks and sounds exactly like you, yeah.” says Vespa. “It’s coincidence.”

“Really creepy, weird, upsetting coincidence.” says Juno. 

“And what’s that noise his – is that his bones, making that ‘tk-tk’ sort of noise?”

“We don’t know.”

“To be honest, I don’t really hear it anymore.”

Buddy is out of the tent by the time it comes back into view. She runs to meet them. At the sight of Guapo blobbing merrily along in Buddy’s arms, Nureyev tries to peel off and dash back into the rock. 

“Just don’t look at him! He’s friendly, I promise.”

Nureyev aims a look of genuine hatred at Vespa. “I cannot believe you kept it!”

“Him. His name is Guapo.”

Nureyev cannot stay mad; Buddy embraces Jet, first, almost lifting him out of Damien’s arms. She pops Guapo into Arum’s arms and goes to Nureyev, kissing him on either cheek three times, and then his forehead. She is crying out of both eyes. Juno didn’t know that her false eye could do that.

“Forgive me.” she mumbles, over and over again. “I should have never let you leave.”

Nureyev wraps her into a one-armed hug. “I didn’t ask your leave to go, Buddy. It’s fine.”

“Ruby says you all had better get back,” Rita says between sobs. “She’s got the engines going. It’s gonna feel like an earthquake. A couple ‘a earthquakes, actually.”

A volcano going off would be a more accurate comparison. The first sign of trouble is a spout of sand that flies a good kilometre into the air. Suddenly there are a dozen of them, accompanied by the sound of several hundred cubic metres of stone uprooting itself from the ground. The ground about the edge of the necropolis splits and crumbles like the crust of fresh bread as the necropolis rises. Hundreds of tonnes of sand and stone begins to slide into the cavern that is being created as the inverted-pyramid shape of the necropolis extracts itself. Had Buddy stayed at the tent to see them in, she would have been sucked in with it. 

The roar is phenomenal. Each of them is compelled to kneel with their hands over their ears- except for Damien, whose hearing loss protects him from the brunt of it, but he does complain of a vibration so powerful that he is worried his teeth will fall out. 

The half-kilometre of the necropolis hauls itself out of the ground and hovers on silent engines for a moment, long enough that Juno worries Ruby might forget about them down here. Then, of all things, a fucking gang-plank drops out of one of the otherwise seamless facets of the pyramid. In her human form, Ruby beckons them from the top of the gangplank. 

Because it is apparently Jet’s fate to be passed about like a newborn during the maternity ward visiting hours, Ruby takes him from Damien the minute he is within reach. She doesn’t say a word to him- out loud. Juno imagines she is tripping over herself to explain herself within his mind. 

“God, Pakak, you guys couldn’t take it in turns to try to die?” she says, counting them off as they come in from the gangplank.

Nureyev doesn’t even need to ask who she is. “Sorry, Ruby, we decided we’d make a boys’ weekend of it.”

The Martian spaceship is truly gigantic on the inside, with diamond shaped walls and wide pathways that cut across it all the way down until the end, where something that looks like a sphere of magma pulses, throwing up a fiery glow on the walls.

“That’s the engine, Juno, don’t worry about it.”

“What’s that shit on the surface about? Why does it look like a bunch of charnel houses up there?”

Ruby shrugs. “I guess our version of solar panels look like human boneyards. Let’s worry about what’s relevant for now, ok? Here- the medbay.”

If she hadn’t said that, Juno would have assumed they were in a closet. It is a lot of wall-mounted shelves, with a single, raised slab on the floor that is the size of a king mattress. A soft light blinks on from the corner as they enter. Laying Jet down on the slab, Ruby turns to Vespa.

“It’s dust in here, Vespa. I’m sorry. The medicine will have rotted away, but the mechanisms are all still working, so this room should have self-sterilised the minute the engine turned over. I’m sorry. It’s- if my blood could heal, I’d be giving them some right now, but I’m not the same type of Martian. I’m barely even the same organism. We’re more like a subspecies now and we can’t regenerate anybody but ourselves- I’m sorry.”

Vespa grabs her hands and squeezes them. “That’s fine, baby. You’ve done enough.”

Glancing at Jet she makes a sound between a laugh and a sniffle. “He told me to shut up and drive. I- I have to go get the settlers. Will you be alright if I-”

Ruby is promptly shooed out of the room, and Vespa immediately switches into business mode. 

“Nureyev, get your narrow butt up here. On the other side. If all I have is a stable examination table, then that’s fine. Now, what in the hell is wrong with Jet?”

“You’re going to think I’ve gone loopy with blood loss,” warns Nureyev. “But I’ve seen him like this before. It was after he came into contact with peanut butter. He’s definitely in the throes of anaphylaxis at the moment.”

Vespa’s jaw drops. “Are you trying to tell me that the Kanagawas implanted a- a fucking tree nut thing in his arm? They were going to control him with a device that releases fucking tree nut matter into his bloodstream?”

“I told you you’d think I was loopy! I’m not, by the way. I am absolutely convinced-”

“It’s fine! I believe you! Where’s the thing that controlled it? If Cecil used it on him earlier and it didn’t make him sick then, there’s got to be some kind of, fucking, ephedrine or bronchodilator setting you can switch it to?”

“The, uh, guard that was chasing us down, they crushed it.” says Nureyev. 

Juno’s heart sinks. “So what do we do?”

“I brought his Epi-pen.” says Buddy.

“That doesn’t help, Bud, not unless we can get that thing to stop poisoning him. Then we’re gonna have to get him somewhere I can do a serious medical intervention. I might have to intubate him. Might even need a medical coma at this point, Jesus and Krisha. This is the worst attack I’ve ever seen.”

And then Juno gets a terrible idea. Like, an idea that is going to make G-d give him a hard, when it is time to go over Juno’s sins.

“It’s in his arm, right?”

“Right.” says Nureyev.

Rita has already caught on. “Aw, Mistah Steel, don’t say it.”

“I gotta, Rita. If- if his arm comes off-”

Buddy turns the colour of flour. Nureyev hides his eyes in the crook of an elbow and swears in his native tongue. Arum and Damien look at each other as if they are thinking about running back down the gangplank before it closes up.

But Vespa actually brightens. “You know what? That could work. The problem is I’m gonna need some kind of consent from Jet to do that, a sharp enough tool and a way to keep him from dying of the shock.”

Silently, Buddy extracts the broadsword from her fanny-pack. At the sight of it, Jet’s eyes grow wide. He clenches a fist and turns his head to look at Nureyev, who can only offer a shrug.  
He looks back at Vespa. He is completely lucid- completely aware of what he is consenting to, which makes it all the worse for Juno when he nods.

There is about to be so much blood in here.

“What about the shock?”

Vespa shakes her head. “There’s nothing. Short of knocking him out. The way he is right now, I’m worried if he passes out, he’s not gonna come back.”

And so there is nothing they can do but brace Jet. Arum holds down his legs and the knees and Damien, his other arm. Buddy clasps Jet’s face between her hands and puts her forehead to his. To prevent Jet from biting his tongue, the hilt of his mother’s ulu is placed between his teeth. It strikes Juno that putting a knife near his mouth is a terrible idea, but they have nothing else use.   
Juno makes a tourniquet out of a strip of Arum’s shirt and secures it just beneath Jet’s shoulder. 

That leaves Vespa with the broadsword. The weight and sharpness of the sword are such that little of her own strength is required. As long as she can lift it and hit what she’s aiming for, the arm will come off.

In the earpiece, Rita begins to recite a Hail Mary. This must be her first time saying it, from the way she stumbles over the words.  
But Jet takes comfort in it. Juno retreats to the corner of a room and turns into it. He tries to lose himself in Rita’s shaky rhythm. He imagines the unfamiliar saint, what she must look like, what she must sound like, and tries to conjure her for Jet. When he hears the sword land, when he hears Rita falter, when he hears Jet make an inhuman hiss because he hasn’t got the breath to scream, this is what he tries to focus on.

“Good job,” Vespa’s voice is low and trembling. “You did it. I’m gonna wrap this up and you’re gonna be ok. Give me a few minutes, Bud, and I’ll help you find a vein for the Epi-pen.”

“Right.”

Juno summons his courage and makes himself turn around. He makes himself look at Jet, at all of them, at the blood that has gotten so far across the room that it is at his feet, and then sags backwards, grateful for the wall’s support.

“You too, Juno.” says Vespa.

“I didn’t do shit.”

“You did.” says Nureyev. “You’re being very brave at the moment. Let us celebrate that.”

Juno wants to turn into the corner again. He wants to stay there for the rest of the day. But he takes a step towards them, figuring he should at least help Vespa dress the wound. He is glad he does because it gives him a chance to see what happens next.  
From the fanny-pack on Vespa’s waist, a pale, green tendril emerges. Before it touches the bloodied ground, it has changed into a leg (in jeans, thank Buddha). Unclipping the pack, Vespa turns it upside-down and gives it a shake to help the Martian the rest of the way out. A carbon copy of Ruby’s composite body slithers out into the sand and gives xemself a shake; the Martian has figured out what skin xe can wear without triggering anybody’s grief. 

Xe look at Juno as they speak, though he gets the feeling xe are addressing all of them. “I can help.”

Juno’s voice breaks. “How?”

“I will give…” xe tap a deep green vein in the inside of xer arm.

“Won’t that, uh, make them blob up?”

“No. That was punishment…this, I will give…freely.”

Vespa pulls a face that would put a gargoyle to shame. “Ok, where were you, Mx Helpful, when I was having to-” she cannot make herself say the words, so just gestures to the mess of blood.

“Will he not…recover from that?”

“I- you know what? This is my bad. No. Humans don’t grow back what comes off of them.”

“Mistah Steel?” whispers Rita.

“The Martian came out. I think, I think xe are offering to heal Jet and Nureyev.”

“Why didn’t xe do that before we took Jet’s dang arm off?”

“Xe didn’t know that humans don’t grow stuff back.”

She sighs. “Except for hair and nails.”

Vespa is not yet satisfied. “I need to know what healing means to you, because this man’s body is on the verge of dying. He’ll need a transfusion and a bronchodilator. If I had proper medical equipment, I would have intubated him already. What are you going to do?

The Martian’s face creases into a frown. “I have…done a disservice…I cannot give back his limb…nor can I cure his sensitivity…what is natural to the body I cannot take away…I can only stop its progress…but I can ease his pain…”

“Meaning? Meaning you can stop up the wound? Open up his airways?” Buddy presses.

“Yes. He will be well. And you,” xe look at Nureyev. “You are…deeply sick. I can…remove the thing that makes it so…”

What other options are there? The Martian is given the space to do as xe will. Xe lay a hand on each man’s forehead. The instant xer hand alights on him, Jet falls into a deep unconsciousness. Nureyev struggles to stay afloat until Juno takes his hand and whispers that he won’t leave him. 

To Juno’s eyes, it seems as though nothing happens for the longest time. Gradually, though, Jet’s breaths come in easier, and one or two of the smaller bruises fade from Nureyev’s arms.  
And while the Martian does xer mysterious work, xe try to explain xemself.

“Once, we were many…now, we are one…me…and the ancestors of those who fled from us…you do not know, you humans, when you look at me that you look at a sickly Martian…before I was found by the ones that cut me…I was weak…and I was one of the last who could claim that. You, Juno, and Jet, you found me among four others…”

“Dead?” suggests Juno.

“No…not yet alive…I am, as you are, born of one that was older than me. A parent. Natural born. I lived in the body grown of their body. But those younger than me…they lived in bodies like those…perfect. No illness, no defect. The same body and brain repeated a hundredfold. To us, it was natural. The regrowth of…lost limbs…refilling of gouges in the body…but we could not heal illnesses we were born with…in this man, Jet, his illness that comes and goes…had he been one of my kin, we would have shed him of his natural body and put him into…a tube-grown body…so that he could live without fear of the illness. And this man, Nureyev, the illness that is grafted to his cells, we would have moved him to a new body…there is another thing within him. What is this? Not an illness…an irregularity?”

“Uh,” Vespa exchanges a look with Juno. “The cystic tissues on his organs? That’s the illness you were talking about.”

“No, the thing of his mind. It is not sickness…it is an irregularity…the one back on Earth, Rita, she has it too.” and xe gesture to Juno.

“Are you talking about fucking ADHD?” says Juno.

“The shape of his…brain is different…I have seen this difference before. And others like it. There are different paths. Different shapes. Different chemicals.”

“I think he’s talking about ADHD.”

“In you, too.” xe gesture to Vespa.

“Yeah, I have a psychosis disorder.”

“And in all of you…there is the brain…but each is shaped differently. Some have issues that colour your perception of the world, that were born into you…some became this way over time…but you are all different. You are all individual. If you put yourself in a body…with a different shape…the fluid of your being would conform to that new shape…and change you. For us, it became so that minds that were not produced by the same, tube-grown brain…could not speak with one another…the bodies became…they were like shells. We became things whose true bodies never met the surface. There was the powerful thing on the outside, the calcified strength, it became a shield against one another…ranks of us without so much as a freckle’s difference. A society that destroys its diversity does not advance. And so we did not… I was not sick. I was not dying. But I was alone. It was a time after Ruby’s kin had left us in fear of what we were becoming… I had stayed because I believed I could still be loved, at home, on Mars, and I was right, but I was also wrong. And so I gave in…I went to a place where…one could exchange their natural body for an unnatural body…wipe oneself clean of all that was different…and I was there when the anti-matter killed us…killed them.”

“So the bodies that were with you- you were going to transfer your consciousness into one of those?” says Juno.

“Yes. I lived because I had not…done so in time…a handful of others did too. For a time, we were together. And then we could not be…the loneliness is amplified when you are one of…several last survivors, rather than a lone survivor…one by one, we drifted apart…one of us, Juno, whom your eye smells of…she put herself in a tube body and went to Mars to rebuild…but there was nothing to build from…and she must have killed herself with the same weapon that killed the first…I waited for her in the facility where she changed…I waited…I was found…I, the bodies and I, were abducted, and I was so weak, so tired of the loneliness of it, that I let myself be taken…”

“You thought I was Miasma- I was your, uh, friend, when you saw me on The Platonium, didn’t you?”

“I realised my mistake…but you had kind eyes. Both of you…so I took a chance. And you have saved me. Juno, that I survive to tell this…that is the punishment…that Mars and the Martians should be remembered and conjured by the people they tried to destroy, and only us, that is the only punishment that can satisfy.”

The Martian lifts xer hands from Jet and Nureyev. Xe unwind the hasty bandages about Jet’s wound and rub away some of the blood with a sleeve, showing them that the flesh has sealed itself up. It is pink and tender in the way of new scar tissue, but it is no longer bleeding, and Jet is out of danger.   
Nureyev proves a little bit more complicated. The bruises have gone. His skin has returned to its natural, healthy colour, but as he comes to, he holds himself the way he does when he is in pain.

Juno helps him sit up. “How do you feel?”

“Better? I can’t tell. I’m in pain, but it’s…it feels normal.”

The Martian nods. “I cannot heal what is not fatal…I do not…the illness, grafted to your cells, I have taken that away…but the scars it left on your nerves…on your tissues, those remain. You will always have pain, but it will not kill you.”

“Are you- are you telling me that my organic kidney is working now?”

The Martian nods. Nureyev looks like he might vomit. Instead, he sees that Jet is breathing, that his arm has healed over, that they are alive now and will be alive tomorrow and buries his face in Juno’s shoulder to cry. 

(Hyperion City)

Notorious as Hyperion City is for producing cynics and nihilists, no one who sees the necropolis lift itself from the bed of the desert, shrug off a few millennia of sand and suck an entire building into its belly before breaching the atmosphere can say that it is not an awe-inspiring site. 

Half-way home to his family and his pasta dinner, Omar Khan spots the necropolis. He climbs onto the lid of a dumpster for a better view and watches the thing glide through the sky, elegant as a spaceship that was neglected for a few millennia can be. If Juno Steel isn’t somewhere up on that vehicle, Omar will eat his badge. He may eat it anyway just to be rid of the damn thing.

In front of Hoosegow, the scene is much the same. A monolith that rises silently from the ground. A city of cynics beneath it, frowning against the sun and the improbability of what they’re looking at.

The last of the cops fled a few moments ago. The rioters are picking themselves and each other up, setting down weapons and clearing space for doctors and nurses to attend to the handful of wounded. Sasha and Alessandra are among them, putting their war-time first-aid training to a good use.  
No one is confirmed to have died, yet. The point of this was to finish dispersing the cops and their collaborators for the mayor and the dragon, and that point has been achieved. 

A few last weapons are lowered to watch the necropolis’s progress. When the hangar is sucked into the ship, many cheer. They have no idea what they are cheering for- just that it was damned cool. 

Mayor Mercury perches on the edge of the platform. He sticks to the half of the stage where he and his friends fought the guards, leaving Cassandra to her half. Mick stripped off his jacket and laid it over her a few moments ago. It only covered her face and a third of the immense wound in her chest, so someone donated the shawl of a sari and another their entire sarong, and they have managed to cover her to her feet. Now she lies in a pool of dried and jellied blood. Mick doubts that Min will come back for the body, for all the fuss she made over it. Too risky.  
As soon as the roads are passable again, an ambulance will take her to the hospital’s morgue. It is a small mercy that she is the only casualty of the day.

Mick thinks on this while he tracks the necropolis’s progress to the edge of the atmosphere and waves goodbye when it breaches. That this revolution, because that is what it is, has been nearly bloodless. This is the just the beginning. Today, Hyperion has demonstrated that Mick has the popular support in the most direct way possible. Tomorrow, Mick hopes that support will remain as he starts the much-needed work on Hyperion. Abolishing the police, training the replacements, rooting out the Kanagawas’ various plants and moles in the infrastructure of Hyperion.  
What a job. On the bright side, Sasha will be working with him this time. And then there’s Juno. He’ll have some advice when next they talk. 

Mick will be the one to call this time. He owes Juno a fair few explanations and apologies. Mick rehearses them in the head, watching the last of the necropolis’s fiery exit dissolve into the shallow stratosphere.

Soon after, Mick realises he has been joined by a host of children in prison jumpsuits. Just over a dozen of them, the youngest barely able to walk. As if this day couldn’t get any weirder.

The tallest and possibly eldest of the group walks up to him. “Hey, you’re Mayor Mercury?”

He stands to attention. “Yes ma’am. And you are?”

“Hawk-Eagle. I’m one of the kids from The Platonium. I’m guessing you didn’t know we were in Hoosegow?”

“If I’d known, you wouldn’t have been in there.”

“See?” Hawk-Eagle calls over her shoulder. “I told you he was cool! You gonna help us? ‘Cos I think we’re orphans.”

Mick sighs. “Yeah, I think you might have to call yourselves orphans for now. Um, look, our social work system isn’t great here. I’m trying to fix it. We’ve kind of got over-flowing orphanages too, but there’s plenty of empty bedrooms in the mayoral manor. I’ll see about setting you kids up in there for now.”

The toddler comes over to Mick and latches onto his leg with the confidence of a stray cat brushing up against a human leaving a butcher’s shop. Mick cannot escape the sense that he has just become a father. 

From the roof of Hoosegow, Rauho Noorssen watches it from the spot he has been rooted to ever since landing. It was supposed to be a quick errand. Zip in, grab Rex Glass, laugh at the Unnatural as he played dead for a universe that already knew better, then be home in time for supper. What he arrived to was a mess of proportions so epic that he wouldn’t believe it if he hadn’t been there to watch it unfurl.

That Min has appeared is just the icing on this disaster-cake. She showed up a few moments ago, her face streaked with dust, tears and blood, rambling an incoherent story about the Unnatural Disaster and betrayals and a laser that swerved to hit her stepdaughter instead of the mayor. Rauho gave her a light sedative and a shot of whiskey to calm her down.   
It calmed her down, in the sense that she is no longer wailing. 

Her blood thirst, on the other hand…

“We have to follow them. I know this ship has the capability to travel at warp speeds. You wouldn’t risk yourself in one that doesn’t, would you?”

Rauho looks between Min and the halo of fire that the necropolis punched into Mars’ atmosphere on the way out.

“You want to chase them?”

“Yes.”

“You do understand that they have a Martian on their side? And are very likely returning to Earth?”

“Yes.”

“If this is about asset collection, I doubt even the Unnatural Disaster is worth it-”

“Rauho. They need to die.”

Rauho sighs and turns over the engine. 

(Utqiagvik)

Jet takes waking up to a missing arm and an unplanned home-coming pretty well, all things considered. He does not even hold it against Guapo when the crew discovers, to a horror that Juno will never stop feeling, Guapo has eaten the arm. It apparently didn’t occur to Vespa to put it somewhere out of his reach, what, with everything else that was going on. 

“Look, I don’t care whether or not my arm gets a proper Catholic burial,” he says, scratching Guapo under the chin. “I’m just happy to be able to breathe again, though I warn you, it may not be for long.”

“Mr Jet, do you really think your sister would let yer friends set up ‘a base ‘a operations in her house if she was gonna kill ya?”

“Yes, Rita, I remember that Emanoraq was always excellent at setting traps.”

The Martian ship moves fast. There is barely enough time to introduce Jet and Nureyev to the other two Earthlings properly and give them a basic idea of what has happened before Ruby appears, announcing that they have arrived in the airspace of Utqiagvik and, naturally, have bene followed.

This is fine. Things are happening as they were expected to. Calmly as they can manage, the crew of the Carte Blanche and their allies return to the entryway of the ship. As they go, they are serenaded by the sound of several dozen Martianised settlers celebrating their liberty. They make a hanging forest of green tentacles above and below. The temperature inside of the ship is rising, too, which makes Juno glad that they are on their way out.

On the way out, Ruby takes his arm. “One of them keeps talking to me about you, Juno. He wants me to tell you that he’s sorry.”

“Is his name Julian?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Tell him it’s fine…are there any people calling themselves Kayrrine, Jiorjah or Nadeing? Maybe a Takagi?”

Ruby concentrates for a moment. “Not that I can hear.”

The ship lands behind Utqiagvik without trouble. The head-start on their pursuing ship means that they are well out of the way when it does show up.

With a crack like thunder and a glow like hellfire, Rauho Noorssen’s sleek ship descends into the cloudless skies of above Utqiagvik. Within a minute, the craft comes to hover less than a hundred metres above the town. 

And perhaps two or three seconds after the ship has begun to hover, the first volley of projectiles is fired. The command comes from an ancient man perched up on the fire-exit of a municipal building. He sits there in a lawn chair, bundled up in blankets and a pair of nigaugek, along with a microphone and a megaphone held up to that by an obliging neighbour.   
In spite of his many layers, the vindictive delight is obvious on his face. He has been waiting for this and could not be more happy about executing this revenge.

Composed of analogue bullets, cross-bow bolts, arrows, slingshot slugs and a handful of spears, the volley passes through the ship’s shields with ease.  
Rauho Noorssen builds his ship with the expectation that he will will be up against lasers and high-powered torpedos designed to maim and murder in the vacuum of space. Hence, the hundreds of ranged projectiles aimed from a few dozen metres down are able to hit home. 

Up in the cockpit, Rauho realises he might have made a mistake. Still, he allows Min to take ahold of the PA system and address the town below them.

“Surrender the Unnatural Disaster, Rex Glass and anybody else that just landed on that ship.”

“Fuck off.” says the old man into the microphone.

The megaphone magnifies his voice by tenfold, bouncing him off the buildings, into the surrounding tundras so that, for a few kilometres around, all of the foxes are scared down into their burrows. In the bay, a few of the September-straggler whales have surfaced out of curiosity. 

It is not just Utqiagvik that has turned out. Up here, on the top of the world, the population has almost trebled with reinforcements from the usual suspects, Provideniya, Tuktoyaktuk and the other North Slope towns, but also a sizeable contingent of Canadian cousins, of people who have darted up from Turtle Island, even a group who schlepped all the way from Central Thai to support their expat, blue in the early autumn cold but no less ready to throw down because of this.

Min is not deterred. “Surrender the Unnatural Disaster and Rex Glass-” the slug of a slingshot pings off of the windshield. Several more follow it, along with an arrow that buries itself a few inches deep. “-and you will be left in peace. We have no wish to-”

“Fuck off!” repeats the elder. 

“We have no wish to engage with you in combat-”

“Go ahead and try it!” says the elder. “We’ve got our own laser shields up. Stripped ‘em off the corpse of the last ship of yours that we destroyed. You can shoot us all you want, you’ll get nowhere and just make us madder!”

“Min,” says Rauho, warningly. “I think we’ve made a mistake, here.”

She takes no notice of him. “You will be fired upon if you don’t comply.” then, to Rauho. “They’re bluffing, watch.”

Min unleashes hellfire in the form of half a dozen missiles of a war-time strength. Of these six missiles, three of them explode before they get fifteen metres away from the belly of the ship, and the other three bounce back and explode inches from the cockpit, just barely blocked by their own shielding.

“Shit!” cries Min. The PA broadcasts this as well.

“I told you!” says the elder. He waves his arm. 

The ship is shaken by the fiercest wave yet of projectiles. A spear thuds into the cockpit with such force that cracks begin to spread in the glass.

“Fuck it!” Rauho slaps Min’s hand off the PA. “That’s it! I’m done!”

Min rounds on him “You can’t just abandon this!”

“The fuck I can’t, woman! I’ve got two dozen spears and a hundred arrows sticking out of my ship!”

“You coward-”

“Min, if you want to go down there and get made into a goddamned pincushion by those fucking lunatics, you can go ahead and let yourself out here!”

She shuts up. She does not offer another word of complaint as the ship is turned around (its back catching what feels like another hundred arrows and spears) and aimed upwards again.   
But, as they are exiting the atmosphere, she grows restless again.”

“Take me back to Mars.”

Rauho stares at her. “Why?”

“I need to get my affairs in order.” 

“What affairs?”

“My house. My assets, the cure-mother. My children-”

Rauho scoffs. “I thought you didn’t want to die, Min, but you sure are talking like it. Hyperion City is lost to you. Unless you want to be killed in a revolution.”

“Revolutions can be influenced. It’s been done plenty of times before.”

“Not this one! Not this one! Have you seen that mayor? The man beaned you in the jaw with a bit of riot armour and now he’s on intergalactic TV, yelling about abolishing the PD and half of the city’s officials on trial for fraud and humanitarian crimes! And you know what? If the man has access to a dragon and a fucking, four-armed tree man, I believe he’ll do it! I’m not touching Mars with a ten foot pole! If I ever seen Earth again, it’ll be too soon! Min, you’re a smart woman. Don’t throw your life away trying to put out forest fires with a goddamned water pistol.”

Tears stream down her cheeks. She cannot meet his eyes as she spits. “Then what the fuck am I supposed to do?”

Rauho shrugs. “You’ll come home with me. I’ll figure something out for you. Min, you’re a business partner, I won’t just throw you under the bus.”

She glowers out of the window, watching Earth fall away beneath them.

“What, no thank you?”

“Thank you.”

“That’s better. Have another drink. I don’t want you bitching and moaning all the way back to my moon, alright? Really, Min, you should have planned all this a little bit better. This is what happens when you Buddy Aurinko and her pack of clowns.”

(Utqiagvik, Juno)

The pursuant ship is in a full retreat by the time the door opens. 

The cold knocks the wind out of Vespa. “Whew! No thanks, I’m going back inside!”

“You stay inside and you’ll end up a galaxy away.” says Ruby.   
She has got Jet braced with an arm about his waist. He is extra vulnerable to the cold what, with being covered in a gallon of his own blood. It already freezes on the fabric and sticks painfully to his skin.

“I don’t give a shit as long as it’s warm-” but Vespa falls silent.

A few of the locals are approaching the gangplank, among them Rita and Soup, bundled up against the cold. They have got coats and blankets for the new arrivals. They have also got Emanoraq with them.  
Though Rita and Soup clearly want to run to the gangplank and smother the crew in hugs, they restrain themselves and let Emanoraq walk out in front.

Jet watches his sister. After a moment, he peels himself off of Ruby and walks down the plank without her support. He is a bit unsteady on his feet, but not so much that Juno worries he will fall. It looks more like nerves.

He stops a few paces away from Emanoraq. She regards him with a mixture of concern and wariness.

Jet’s Inupiaq comes out confident, although this is the first time in a long time that he has spoken with another fluent speaker. He never let himself forget his native language, clearly.

“Hi, Sissy. I heard Arcady died.”

“Hey, Jetty.” she tosses him a coat that was draped over her arm. “She did. Stroke. Who told you?”

“I have an online subscription to the paper, here. I read her obituary. Was she in pain?”

“No. She was gone the minute the vein burst.” 

“She on the family plot?”

“Mm-hm. Between Mom and YJ.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah…” Emanoraq sighs and rubs her temples. “You know, I worked for a really long time to forgive you. I read the Bible, prayed, went to church. I went over the oral histories and the old stories. I sat with Inuk holy people and holy people from all over Turtle Island. I worked and worked and worked. I got married, I had my daughter, I did all of these things that I thought would bring me closure, but you know what it was, in the end, that let me forgive you?”

“What?” says Jet very softly.

“I watched ‘Naruto’.”

A laugh bursts out of Jet. He claps a hand over his mouth. “I beg your pardon?”

Emanoraq smiles and it is Jet’s smile. “I said I watched ‘Naruto’. You know that sad character, Sasuke? He’s got the most fucked up relationship with his big brother. For some reason, watching him try to kill that guy and then work through their shit was really cathartic for me. I told myself, if Jetty ever comes back home, I’m not gonna be a Sasuke. I want him to be a good part of my life because he’s the only sibling I have left.”

Tears flow freely down Jet’s face. He makes no effort to wipe them. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Come here.”

He lets his big sister wrap him up in the coat, and then another, and then flip a hood up so that his wettened face is shielded from the wind. And then he lets her wrap an arm around his shoulders and guide him away, towards home. Jet looks back once and catches Ruby’s eye. She smiles and waves.  
Whatever they are saying to each other is another private exchange between minds.

Rita and Soup take that as their cue to rush up. Vespa rushes to meet them and bundles herself in a coat quickly, tucking Guapo in beside her so that they are sharing a hood. Her teeth knock together as she descends the gangplank. Buddy and the other Earthlings follow. Arum and Damien over-take Buddy when they spot a tall, dark-haired woman and crash into her arms- their wife, Rilla. 

This leaves Juno and Nureyev to say goodbye to the Martians.

Ruby hugs Nureyev for a long time. “I’ll come back some day, I promise.”

“I believe you.”

“Just- I have to get the settlers home, and help out the older one, and then I’ll come back, I promise.”

“Don’t worry, Ruby. Jetffrey and I will leave the garage unlocked for you.”

Juno gives them some privacy. He preoccupies himself with hugging Rita and Soup.

“Look atcha!” Rita pats the Martian’s arm. “On yer own two feet an’ all! You gonna be ok?”

“I am not…thrilled that the ship is full of my past tormentors…but the trip will not be long…and I am ready to be amongst my kin…once more.”

“Thank you.” Juno squeeze’s the Martian’s hand. “Thank you for saving them.”

“You saved me.”

“Stay saved, ok? Call the shots for yourself. If Ruby’s people aren’t what you’re looking for, promise me that you won’t stay out of, I don’t know, obligation? Promise me that you’ll stay free.”

“I will. Take this.”

Xe press something into Juno’s hand. A phial? Full of a greenish liquid. 

Juno’s stomach flips.

“Is this-”

“My blood. Cure-mother. Given freely. It works best when it is given…of one’s own free will. I know that it was important to you…see what you can make of it…”

Juno puts the phial in his pocket and embraces the Martian. After a moment’s hesitation, the Martian hugs him back.

There is one more thing that he has to address. He does so on the chilly trek back to the Sikuliaqs’ house.

Soup is anxious because she can feel it coming. At least she doesn’t try to stop him when he starts talking.

“So, honey, I think your…I think your parents might not be around anymore.”

“I know.”

“I mean, I think they might be-”

“Doesn’t matter,” Soup is hanging onto his glove and begins to swing their arms together as they walk. “They weren’t around when I lived with ‘em, so, like, it’s not important.”

“Ok. But you know, if it starts to feel important later on, that’s ok. It’s ok to be sad.”

“I know it’s ok to be sad! Duh!”

Juno swallows the taste of bile from his throat. “Honey, I think… this whole thing with running across the world with a couple of Martians, it might be over. It might not be. I don’t know…but I think we’ll have to stay here for a bit. For as long as it takes Jet and Nureyev to recover, and then, well, space might be dangerous for us for a while. We’ve got work to do down here anyway.”

“What’s that mean?”

Juno searches for a way to say this that won’t make her cry, or him. “It means…it means that we’re going to be in one place, I think. We’ve got to work on the Martian stuff and…I guess it means we’re here for a while, since Jet has family here and Arum and Damien say they’ve got the kind of medical resources we need up here.”

“Can I stay? With you?”

There go the tear-ducts. It’s like Soup has got a hand on a faucet inside of Juno. 

“If you want to try it, yeah, I’d like that. I think the others would like it too.”

She bounces with excitement. “Juno, I changed my name while you were gone! ‘Cos Vespa said she did it, an’ so did your boyfriend, right?”

“Uh, yeah-”

“So if you guys did it that means I can do it too! Wanna hear?”

Juno smiles. “Sure, hit me with it.”

“Buttcrack!” she exclaims.

The face Juno pulls must be hilarious, because she busts out laughing.

“I’m just kidding.” she grins at Juno. “Remember th’ stuff that Arum and Damien gave you guys to keep you awake, the monkey stuff? That’s my name. Olala.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See y'all in the epilogue!


	25. Epilogue. With love, from the North Slope

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Psych! The end wasn’t the end! There’s one more little chapter to see us off. We’re checking in with Soup/Olala, and then that’s really it. 
> 
> Trigger warnings: mentions of prosthetic limbs, of cancer cells in relation to a lab environment
> 
> Suggested listening: M83, Raconte-moi une historie

On the same day that Olala’s many parents finally realize their child is completely undocumented, a working sample of the cure-mother is produced. 

It is a Saturday when Vespa mentions that she and Rilla might have made a break-through. On the morning of the next Tuesday, Vespa bursts into the house screaming the traditional ‘eureka’. A series of lab-grown tissues have been healed and stayed healed of a variety of ailments, ranging from tumors to traumatic wounds to a growth of cystic tissue developed from a sample of Brahmese PKD- all healed!  
With this comes a possibility of leaving Earth- not just for the moon, but for Mars, Venus, Jupiter, the Outer Rim. The onus, too. Now that Rilla and Vespa have put together a working sample of the cure-mother and are beginning the glacial movement into human trials, one of them will have to leave Earth. The cure-mother isn’t going to distribute itself, after all.

“God! Not that I don’t love Utqiagvik, Auntie Emanoraq and Uncle Marc, but I am gagging to be among people that aren’t three heads taller than me!” Vespa exclaimed on the morning, dancing Olala around the kitchen. “And there’s so much to explore, baby girl! We’ll show you all of the planets and moons, if you want. Hell, maybe we’ll even find Saturn’s ring while we’re up there, I’m sure it would be a load of Jet’s mind if he knew where he put it.”

Unfortunately, Olala had to burst her bubble. “Mom, I don’t have a passport.”

She’s got to hand it to her folks. While they’re good at making her feel loved and engaging with her interests, they’re absolutely terrible at the clerical, official paper-work side of things.  
That’s what Olala gets for allowing a pack of criminals to raise her. Of course they wouldn’t consider the official processes that most other people in the world have to observe- the birth certificates, medical history, social security number and all of those other things Olala doesn’t have. 

Vespa, Juno and Nureyev were born or slipped into the kind of poverty that excluded them from regular social order and its ragged security nets. Nureyev, in particular, has spent his whole adult life just lying his face off when it comes to stuff like names and identities. Even after six years of living in Utqiagvik, most people around here only know him as ‘Pakak’. Nureyev would rather answer to a dog’s name than use the one name he’s willing to admit to them. Honestly, Olala has to admire him and aspires to reach the same level of cagey pettiness one day.  
And then Buddy, Rita and Jet were born into communities where everybody knew everybody’s business. More often than not, people knew who you were just by looking at you. Add to that, all three of them left home in circumstances that kind of burned bridges and took on careers that negated the need for identity-proving paperwork, and Olala can’t really blame them for the blind spot, massive though it is.

So began what Olala has called a ‘forge-a-thon’. From Tuesday night to now, the night of the same Thursday, her parents have been in a frenzy of filing and signing, running through fifteen years’ worth of paperwork in two days. They are setting her up as a person independent of them in the clerical system of the galaxy so that Olala will be able to explore, later on, without having to use a fake name everywhere she goes.  
They have just come upon a new and pressing problem, now that everything is in front of them. What the hell is Olala’s surname?

With six parents, you’d think she would be spoiled for choice. But each name presents its own problem. 

“I imagine she’ll explore space at some point. She can hardly go about calling herself Aurinko or Steel or Sikuliaq.” says Buddy.

The six of them, along with Olala, are gathered in the kitchen/dining room. Every inch of the over-sized table is given over to various bits of paper that will confirm and track Olala’s existence when they are finished. Olala alternates between feeding crumbs from her biscuit to Guapo, parked in his usual groove under her chair, and looking at the TV mounted in the corner.

The TV is turned to a Martian news channel- one of many that formed after the spectacular collapse of the Kanagawa’s channel. Sure, there were plenty of others within the family that were pulling strings and running the company, but when a citizens’ revolution takes particular issue with the way that your company treated them, you can be sure of being pulled apart. The company was shredded. Its wealth was redistributed among the decaying public infrastructure of Hyperion City. Every single implicated Kanagawa or Kanagawa-adjacent that didn’t leave Mars the day after the revolution began was arrested and prosecuted.

Mick completed his last term as the mayor about a month ago. One of the changes he made to the office was setting a limit on term dates, and shoring up the anti-corruption policies around elections to ensure that the candidates who got in were, indeed, been elected by the people, rather than various pressure groups.  
Now, he’s an advisor to the current mayor: a Cameraman that was once named Juno. CameramenTM didn’t really use names to distinguish themselves from each other before they were ever liberated, and this custom has survived in the six years since. Apparently taking on names would feel as infantilizing as answering to the nicknames that their creator gave many of them. These days, CameramenTM prefer to be addressed as ‘Sir’ or ‘Ma’am’ or ‘Mx’, and if you’re referring to one in third person, you say something like “My friend Mx did so and so yesterday”.  
It sounds confusing, but Olala understands why they rejected ideas of naming entirely. If your name was given to you by someone who treated you poorly, getting rid of that name is a way of getting a bit of freedom from them. 

Mick is up there, beside the Cameraman, now ‘Mx Mayor’. They are talking about a health-care program or something of the sort. The Cameraman communicates through a combination of text on their lens-face and a device fitted into their throat that allows them to speak as though they had human vocal cords.

“Be a Penumbra,” it comes out as a dry hiss that wouldn’t sound out of place if it was trying to coax Olala into a dark well. Rita is hunched over her laptop in the process of faking a birth history. “Join me. Oh…oh wait, don’t, then people are gonna think yer a wizard. Take it from me, baby, bein’ a wizard sucks. All the powers I got are train powers an’ I hate trains…we might gotta make something up.”

Olala wouldn’t mind becoming a Penumbra if there wasn’t that wizardly connotation. Magic is difficult to learn and harness, and tends to attract the attention of the oil ghosts. She had enough of adventuring and heroism in that first dose that she got on The Platonium. Sure, magic is great, but it’s great for other people.  
Rita has made some headway in reconnecting with her family. She might not have if not for the month of darkness that sits on Utqiagvik every winter. That darkness can be hard on folks who haven’t grown up accustomed to it, and even some of the locals have to take refuge lower down on Turtle Island to spare their minds. Rita’s first attempt at riding out the darkness saw her breaking down only a week into it; she was discovered face-down screaming into a snow-drift about a headache that hadn’t gone away in four days.

Vespa, too, struggles with the month of darkness, so the month in Manhattan has become a girls’ trip. Rita, Vespa and Olala load themselves up on a train and bid the rest of the family a farewell for thirty days. Oftentimes, Juno comes down to spend the last two weeks with them. Really, though, he spends those two weeks in the synagogue, catching up with his faith. Historically, Utqiagvik has never had a large Jewish population. There are enough that Juno was able to join a study/faith group that meets every other shabbat, but he longs for the larger community that a place like Manhattan provides.

Olala breaks off another chunk of biscuit and holds it under the chair. An upsettingly prehensile tongue pries it out of her fingers.  
“Make something up? I don’t want to do that. I’ll just use somebody’s middle name, or something.” 

Putting a fourth cup of coffee in front of Rita, Vespa ruffles Olala’s hair in her absent, fond way and stumbles over Guapo as she puts the coffee pot back on its eye. “I’d say be an Ilkay with me, but it’s the same problem. There are a couple of systems that would investigate you or ban you outright for just having the same name as me. I’d be getting angry letters from my extended family if they had an address to send them to.”

“Isn’t your name just ‘kill’ in pig-Latin?” says Olala.

Vespa frowns. “Huh. Well- huh. What do you fucking know, it is.”

“Hey!” Nureyev snaps his fingers and points at an over-stuffed swear-jar in the corner. 

Money is not a thing on Earth, so the transgressor must write their name on a post-it note and put it into the jar. At the end of the week whoever has sworn the most in Olala’s presence has to do an unpleasant chore, like cleaning out the snow gutters or changing the oil in the snow-mobile.  
Vespa pretends to scribble her name down. When she thinks Olala isn’t looking, she puts her hand in the jar and flips Nureyev the middle finger. 

“You want to use a middle name?” repeats Buddy. “We’re not exactly rife with those, are we? You could use mine, I suppose, but I don’t know if I like the sound of ‘Olala Aino’. A bit too many vowels for my taste.”

“Yeah, but you’re picky as shit, Mama.”

Nureyev scowls. “Look at what you’ve started, Vespa. It’s a cascade of curse words. She’ll sound like a sailor if we’re not careful.”

Reaching for the pitcher, Olala pours herself a glass of orange juice. “What about Ai?” 

Vespa frowns. “Kid, that name is for geography. It’s like a clan name for Dysomniacs. People would think you were born in that neighbourhood.”

“You could go for a family name,” says Juno. He is faking his way through a couple of documents that will make it look like Olala went to an Earthling kindergarten “There’s plenty of those. Just stay away from Buddy’s family.”

“What is wrong with the names Sportti and Champ?”

“You just answered your own question.”

“So I should name myself Emanoraq?”

Juno shakes his head. “No living people names. That’s gonna get the souls mixed up. It’s bad luck to invite that on yourself, so that puts ‘Yuka’ off limits too.”

Olala is about to complain when a huge shadow falls over her. She tilts her head up. “What’s up, Daddy?”

“Could you stand up?”

She does. Jet has her hold her arms out and begins to go over her with a tape measurer. As he bends his right arm, the prosthetic, there is the faint sound of a gears whirling in his elbow beneath the sleeve.

“Are you measuring me for a coffin?”

“No, Olala, don’t joke about that. This is for your passport.”

“I don’t even have a surname to put on it, Daddy. I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves.”

He continues as if he has not heard her. “You’ve gone up a shoe-size since your last check up. I would love it if you would stop doing that, by the way, or at least stagger out your growth spurts.”

Jet has been the one to help her clothe herself, mainly because he doesn’t trust the others’ sense of style. He is convinced that Buddy and Nureyev would dress her like a baby mob-boss, Rita would put her only in pink knitwear and Juno in only turtlenecks. Vespa doesn’t even think about the way she dresses herself- if she isn’t in her scrubs, she’s in overalls, so she is no help.  
Hence, Jet. He allows her plenty of freedom and was supportive during last year’s brief flirtation with goth fashions, which made it way less fun. Juno also kept using her eyeliner and putting her own attempts at wings to shame, so Olala has let that be for the moment. She might try the lumberjack style next. Maybe she’ll start wearing a tutu over everything. The world is her oyster and Jet is supportive enough of her weirdness that he won’t intervene. 

“Why’s immigration need to know my dimensions anyway?”

“Fun?” Nureyev slaps a sheaf of photos on the table, all of Olala, and fans them out in front of her and Juno. “Probably for statistics, honey, don’t worry about it. We need a recent photo of you for your passport. Which one of these do you prefer?”

Rita peers past her laptop and smiles. “This one of you is so cute! That one’s cute too- and that one!”

Buddy leans over Rita’s shoulder. “God, Olala, I wish you wouldn’t make faces like that. You’re so pretty and so smart and you just can’t tell in the photos because if you aren’t running away from the camera, you’re pulling a demonic expression.”

Olala frowns at Nureyev. “Wait, Baba, are you- are you forging this too?’

“Of course.”

“Why don’t we just go through the proper channels? Take a photo at the Post Office? Everybody knows us here, they’re not gonna try to arrest us.”

“Proper channels? Like a pervert? I can’t believe you’d suggest such a thing, and at the kitchen table, of all places!”

“Ooh, what about aliases?” suggests Rita. “You could use one ‘a yer baba’s old aliases! I always loved the name Rorschach! You could be Olala Rorschach , or Olala Minthe!”

“No,” says Juno. “That makes her sound like a supervillain.”

“You can sit back down now, thank you.” Jet stows the measurer in his pocket and begins to note down his daughter’s dimensions on a spare sheet of paper.

“What about Ruby?”

Bringing the name up, as always, causes a beat of silence. Jet and Nureyev exchange a significant look over Olala’s head.

Neither of her fathers are terribly open when it comes to talking about Ruby. Nureyev holds her close to his chest the way he holds much of his past. Jet has a hard time talking about her. Doing so will inevitably make him a bit sniffly. Missing Ruby has got to be a powerful emotion if it pierces through the stoical hermit-crab’s shell from which he conducts his business.  
On nights when the sky is clear of both clouds and the sacred sprawl of the Northern Light, Olala knows to listen out for the thrum of a snow-machine’s engine. She knows to go to her window and watch the headlight weave out of Utqiagvik and into the tundra. She knows when the light blinks out that Jet has picked a spot for the night, where he will stay for hours on end, sometimes until the dawn if the weather is not too harsh, and examine the stars overhead for one that moves. 

Olala relents. “Ok, too loaded. I do have another idea, though.”

“Sure,” says Juno. “Hit us.”

“What about…” her courage nearly fails her, but now that the idea’s in her head she can’t let go of it. “Well, I kind of want a name that’s Nihongo like my old surname was. And I was thinking, Mame, maybe I could…well it’s the Shinto aspect of the Buddhist deity he was named after, so…so what about Benzaiten? I could be Olala Benzaiten.”

Juno’s eye wells up. He glances away, down at the sleeve of Benzaiten, vivid and beautiful as the day he got it almost thirty years later. Nureyev puts a hand on his shoulder and smiles at Olala.

He reaches across the table and squeezes Olala’s hand. “Sounds like a plan to me, honey.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well folks, there we go.
> 
> I wasn't expecting to write the small novel and a half that I did for this fic, but rest assured it's because the wonderful readership were so enthusiastic about the crazy ideas that I kept throwing out there. This thing was half a fanfic, half an original work, kind of, because really, how in the hell does dinosaur-haunted oil relate to anything in the Penumbra canon? But y'all were patient and willing to come with me on a tour of wildly different settings and a weird world because I was dragging our beloved characters through it, and that's truly the magic of fanfic! Whatever you want to write, you can write it!
> 
> I want to thank every single person who has interacted with this fic in any way. People who have been commenting from almost the first chapter, people who dropped kudos, people who have lurked, even people who have maybe had this tab open or saved for a while and are putting it off because it's a prohibitively long train-wreck of a piece. Thanks to all of you! Writing this fic has been a creative catharsis and a wonderful experience, and I can't wait to come back with another one...after my wrist heals and my university term is finished.
> 
> Much love and appreciation to you all, and stay safe however you can!


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